Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]

I entirely agree with the Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee. I know that he has made this issue an important cause, and I support and pay tribute to his stressing this point. Let me turn to issues relating to retrospective application. Our new clause 7 seeks to limit the retrospective application of part 2 of the Bill. It would protect migrants already on the path to citizenship from having their requirements for citizenship changed at the last minute. It would give a 12-month grace period for any migrant seeking to apply for indefinite leave to remain, after and before the commencement of the Bill. Neither the Government's nor the Conservatives' amendments seek to redress the unfairness and injustice that part 2 will inflict on the many people who have embarked on the path towards settlement with the expectation of gaining indefinite leave to remain. Government amendment 17 is an improvement on their previous proposals, but it is too narrow in its application, as it restricts the time period for migrants to obtain indefinite leave to remain status. The Conservative proposal is just as worrying, as it discriminates in favour of those who have entered this country via the highly skilled migrants programme. It implies that those who work in the UK on work permits, or who are highly skilled but did not enter through the highly skilled migrants programme, have not made as valuable a contribution to the UK, and so are not entitled to a grace period while finishing their citizenship process. To make matters worse, clause 39, the Lords amendment that our new clause seeks to replicate, was a Conservative amendment proposed by Baroness Hanham. In the Lords debates, more than one Conservative peer spoke vehemently on this subject, recognising the injustice inherent in part 2. By collaborating with my Liberal Democrat colleagues, the Conservatives managed to defeat the Government on this. One can imagine our shock when, in the Commons Committee stage, we discovered that a strange line had been drawn by the Conservatives to separate highly skilled migrants from other migrants, giving one group—oddly enough, arguably the wealthier group—preferential treatment. Their amendment ignores hard workers, it ignores spouses and it ignores basic human rights. The morality behind our new clause 7 is simple: there needs to be transitional protection for all migrants already on the path to citizenship. It is unfair to alter the rules for those who have already adhered to them by lengthening the qualification period and throwing in other provisos such as active citizenship. That is, in principle, what the High Court found on 6 April 2009—that it is unlawful to increase the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain from four to five years for people who were already in the UK on the highly skilled migrants programme. Surely the same logic should apply here: fair play means not moving the goalposts in the middle of the game. Let me deal finally with volunteering activity. The rest of our amendments are linked to the provisions for active citizenship and continuous employment. While the Liberal Democrats do not object to the idea of earned citizenship as a whole, the Government provisions for active citizenship and continuous employment have created more problems than solutions. We have thus tabled these amendments as an attempt to remedy the problem.