Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I do not know whether we can usefully return to this matter on Report. After all, we have now been arguing the case for 22 years since the Hong Kong (British Nationality) Order 1986 and the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997, and we have not been able to get anywhere with successive Ministers, although we have had undertakings from them. I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, and to my noble friend Lord Thomas for their support for the propositions that we have advanced. As the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, said, statelessness is a very severe disability and it is monstrous that the Government should be visiting this on a small number of helpless people who, they know, cannot retaliate. We are not talking about a vast number of people; we are talking about the people who failed the ordinary residence test, not because they had left to go to some other country, as the Minister pretends, but because they were absent on short-term assignments, were studying abroad or were children whose parents had taken them out of the country. The fourth category that I gave was the children who were in Hong Kong on the date of the handover but who were not counted because their parents were abroad and therefore they were deemed not to be ordinary residents. The Minister did not reply to any of those points. He just ignored them and said that all these people must have departed Hong Kong to live permanently in another country. That is completely false. He also ignored everything that I said about the assurances that had been given by successive Ministers that no person who lost BDTC status as a result of the handover of Hong Kong to China, nor any child born to such a person, would be made stateless. Therefore, these people are not fully catered for, as the Minister pretends. The provisions are not sufficiently comprehensive to make these amendments unnecessary, as we have shown, and I can produce other examples if he wishes. I do not want to have to go to Liverpool to produce examples of people who have been made stateless, because everything is in the correspondence. If the Minister asks his colleagues at the Home Office, he will find that there are plenty of letters from me about these individuals who have been made stateless, either because they were not ordinary residents at the time or because they could not fulfil other conditions. We are not talking about thousands of people; we are talking about a very few people who were BNOs and who should have been granted the privileges that the Government promised them at the time. The Government have undoubtedly reneged and failed a small but significant minority of people. Although I shall withdraw the amendment, I do so with—