My Lords, I want to support Amendments 83 and 84 and really thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, for putting them forward. I do not know whether she will be grateful but I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. Whether she wants me or not, I am one of the terriers she has managed to inspire in this instance. I have tried to pursue a bit of theme—I raised it at Second Reading and in Committee—that the Bill should have been used, apart from anything, to send a positive message about the benefits of being a citizen and those special rights and duties characteristic of any nation state. I feel the Government have missed a trick.
It seems to me that these modest amendments could punch above their weight by, on the one hand, removing entirely unnecessary barriers to citizenship but, on the other, making a positive case that we care about citizenship by doing so. It is a reminder that the barriers we are talking about here are not necessary. They are just financial ones. These are people whom the British state, according to its own British Nationality Act, says are entitled to citizenship, so that is not even in dispute. That is what is so irritating about this.
The fees are undoubtedly causing people problems and putting them off realising their citizenship rights. We have already heard the details. But the fact that you can be charged well over £1,000—despite the Home
Office estimating that it takes only £372 to cover costs—just makes it feel like a rather grubby money-raising scheme. The amendment rightly tackles the fact that you should restrict any fee to just covering the real cost. I worry that it sends a message that citizenship is being cheapened morally by charging too much.
This goes beyond money because we need to consider what it means. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the right reverend Prelate both referred to what this means politically. It is completely counterproductive that citizenship is treated in this financial way because of the impact it has on social bonds and cohesion. Rather than citizenship which allows a sort of national solidarity of citizens—as we have inspiringly seen among the citizens of Ukraine—instead we are socialising new generations into a kind of shadow citizenship status that is fracturing and creates cynicism in the UK’s very commitment to the belonging, to equal rights and virtues and to the promise of what it means to be British.
1 am
To quote the High Court again, it said that, by excluding children from their citizenship rights, the fee makes them
“feel alienated, excluded, isolated, ‘second-best’, insecure and not fully assimilated into the culture and social fabric of the UK.”
The context here is the broader problem, which many across parties, in civil society and even prominent members of the Conservative Party know, that there is a real concern about powerful and regressive trends that are tugging hard at those threads of the cultural and social fabric of society, whether it is identity politics or a fashionable hostility to British values, or even to the idea of a “united” kingdom. Why would the Government add to that fragmentary trend by unnecessarily undermining the integration of all their citizens into the nation state?
Could the Minister take back to the Government that this is a miserly, penny-pinching policy that creates a negative relationship between the state and a section of the citizenry, and denies rights for no good reason? He should just get rid of it.