Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

In moving Amendment 45 in my name and that of my noble friend, I shall speak also to Amendment 105A. As the Minister is aware, we do not like the term "probationary citizenship" because the status that it covers is in reality an extension of temporary residence leave, prolonging the time that it takes to get to applying for actual citizenship by a year and in the meanwhile imposing certain restrictions on access to services that did not previously apply to those who were on indefinite leave to remain. We are grateful to the Minister for providing us with a list of the benefits that may not be accessed by a person who is given probationary citizenship leave, or PCL as I shall call it from now onwards, which those on indefinite leave to remain, ILR, have been able to access in the past. As the note accompanying the list makes clear, making a holder of PCL a person "subject to immigration control"—the first of many terms of art used in this Bill—within the meaning of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 means that he is subject to the condition that he should not have recourse to public funds. In practice, that means that he is ineligible for any of 15 different types of benefit that are available to those on ILR. Apart from that, the overseas rate of fees in further and higher education will apply to holders of PCL who are over the age of 18 except in the one case of English for the speakers of other languages, which is to be charged at the home rate on the sensible ground that it will help migrants to acquire the skills that they will need to support their progress towards citizenship. Logically, precisely the same argument applies to every other course of further and higher education, and I invite the Minister to tell us why a course in, say, English history or on local authority management would not equally assist the probationary citizen to make himself useful. Amendment 105A deals with the case of a person who becomes homeless through no fault of his own during his passage through the probationary citizenship phase. Under the Bill he is given none of the assistance that is normally extended to persons who become homeless. We ask the Minister why this should be so. If someone who is in the middle of a probationary citizenship phase becomes homeless—let us say that a spouse who is attacked by a violent partner becomes homeless during that part of her stay—why is she ineligible for any assistance? That should be added to the list of exceptions in the Bill. I beg to move.