As I intimated earlier, I have never been a member of the armed forces, but I am acutely aware of that through my contacts with constituents and the Royal British Legion, and particularly the Ashburton branch. I should like to take this opportunity to salute all they do to support not only servicemen, but their families and those in wider community who are affected, when they have difficulties. The Bill is a totemic issue. Were it to fail to pass, it would have serious implications for the message we seek to send to our armed forces in support of them.
The anomaly whereby, if a person happens not to have been resident within the UK five years prior to the moment at which they make their application for naturalisation, they cannot, even at the discretion of the Home Secretary, achieve British citizenship, is quite wrong. I hope the Minister gives serious thought to how reapplications by the small number of individuals who have been caught by that anomaly in the 1981 Act can, in some sense, be looked upon more favourably than if they had not applied or failed in the past because of the anomaly.