Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]

I am happy to have given way to a member of the Select Committee. He is right in what he says, and it applies not only to children. Those who come to our surgeries, including the Minister's surgery in Oldham—I am so pleased that he is in this job, because every Friday he knows what the problems are—discuss not only children in detention centres, but people waiting for years for Miss Homer and her wonderful team to settle these cases. These people cannot work, as has been said by my hon. Friends the Members for Walthamstow and for Islington, North in every immigration debate that I have attended. We do not give these people the right to work. We keep them in destitution for four years because of our administrative inefficiency and eventually we ask them to leave. As we speed up the processing of those cases, we have to find a compromise that will allow them at least to take up work while their cases are being considered. I take the point about my almost concluding as a hint that I should do so. A number of hon. Members have discussed the nature of active citizenship and the path to citizenship, and the Select Committee touched on that in its report on this Bill. May I remind the Minister of the reason why we had to conclude our investigation and then report? When this Bill was originally published the Minister did not know what was going into it, so we had no detail. A broad-brush approach was being taken and there was no detail for the Select Committee to scrutinise—that is why we had to conclude. As there was no information to allow us to scrutinise what the Government were proposing in the Bill, there was no point in our continuing our work and so we published our report. The Committee said that it was extremely worried about this notion of active citizenship. Who is an active citizen? Are we putting on immigrants to this country—who choose to come here to become British citizens—a greater burden than we put on our own citizens? Are we going to ask such people to be better citizens than those born in this country? I was not born in this country, but my son and daughter have been born here. Does that mean that if I did not have citizenship when I came here I would have had to do more than someone who was born here? That is the problem with creating two classes of citizenship. Of course it is a great privilege to be a British citizen. My father and mother always wanted to be British citizens, and they wanted the same for their children. In a sense, those who come here as immigrants respect this country much more, because they know what a privilege it is to stay here. We need to address these issues, and people need to know what they must do in order to gain citizenship.