Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am afraid that I, too, am very sceptical about this volunteering scheme. At Second Reading, I said that it seemed quite wrong to be requiring this degree of volunteering in order to knock quite a proportion off the increased period required for qualifying for citizenship. Above all, if we all volunteered—it would be a good idea, and a large proportion of people do during their lifetime—it might be much more acceptable. However, as the noble Lord has just said, to require it not of all citizens but only for this reason is not a good idea. We all need to know a great deal more about the point about Volunteering England and the design group, which everybody seems a bit nonplussed by. If the Government are absolutely fixed on it, I suppose that we are not likely to see them pull back from it. Particularly in the case of those immigrants with the sort of families that require a great deal of time to care for—family members may be disabled or have learning difficulties and so on—and, above all, of those who have been performing for some time within their own communities to help new immigrants to settle into our community, I would automatically give them a tremendous plus and entitle them to citizenship rather earlier. I hope that this can be gone into in much more detail.