My Lords, I was pleased to add my name to this amendment. At the risk of frazzling the Government Front Bench even further, I did so with citizenship having been one of my main areas of research and scholarship as an academic—fear not, I will not wear your Lordships’ patience with a treatise on the subject—and also having served on the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement, chaired so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbots.
Although, as our committee’s report made clear, citizenship is not just about the legal question of who is a citizen, some of our debates during Committee have raised important issues about this aspect of citizenship. During the first day of Committee, noble Lords such as the noble Lords, Lord Moylan and Lord Anderson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, spoke about how citizenship has been degraded in recent decades by successive Governments. Their focus was exclusively on deprivation powers, but it is not only in respect of those powers that this degradation has happened.
Important too is the exclusion from citizenship of children and young people who are required to register their entitlement, as mentioned by the noble Lord, because of the immigration status of their parents, even though they may have been born in and/or lived their lives in the UK. Aspects we debated on the first day of Committee were the failure to raise awareness of rights of registration, the requirement to show good character even for children as young as 10 and the introduction of well above cost fees, which were described as punitive by the noble Lord.
With regard to the last issue, the level of fees charged for registration, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, for his letter of 8 February. In particular, I appreciate its recognition that the best interests of the child review required by the Court of Appeal under Section 55 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 is separate from the point appealed to the Supreme Court. The decision on the Supreme Court appeal was published on 2 February, as noted in the letter, yet the rest of the letter was written as if it had not yet been published, which I found rather puzzling. It was a disappointing result from my side but, as the letter acknowledged, it raised a separate issue from that of the earlier best interests appeal, the result of which the Home Office accepted.
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I have to say that, in view of that, it is still not clear to me why the best interests review had to wait over a year for that judgment. But, now that the judgment has been given, can whichever Minister is replying give us some idea of when we can expect the outcome of the best interests review and an assurance that it will be published? I ask because we may well want to return to this issue on Report.
The theme of my academic work was how we can best develop inclusive citizenship that recognises the importance of citizenship to identity, security and belonging. While that raises much wider issues than those we have debated in this Committee, from the perspective of both the exercise of deprivation powers and the barriers to accessing citizenship registration rights, we have been addressing ways in which citizenship is all too often in practice more exclusive than inclusive, especially for people of colour. The amendment would facilitate a public debate on the implications of this legislation for citizenship and cohesion, which are vital in the face of the many divisions that risk tearing our country apart. I hope the Government will take it seriously.