Brian Leishman

I beg to move. That this House has considered refugee citizenship rights. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. Refugees should not be reduced to statistics. After all, refugees are human beings, and every human being deserves to be treated with dignity, respect and compassion, and with empathy for their vulnerability and their need for safety. How we treat each other is a basic measurement of us as people and of the kind of society that we live in. Every day we see prejudice, oppression and war. It would be easy to consider those issues as mere news items, but they demand a co-ordinated international response of co-operation based on humanity, social inclusion and integration. On 10 February, the Home Office introduced significant amendments to the good character requirement guidance for British citizenship, which will have profound and lasting impacts on thousands of people who are already here in the UK and have been granted protection status following a well-founded fear of persecution or violence. They will likely be denied citizenship just because of the way in which they came to the UK, and that will include people who travelled by small boat or in other ways. We should bear in mind that those are people who have made their new home and life here, and they have been working and contributing to our economy and culture. The change was made in the back of a document, without any significant parliamentary scrutiny, and today’s debate, over five months later, will be the first time that it has been substantively discussed in this place. Given that we are elected officials and legislators, that is simply not good enough. Under the policy, anyone who arrived in the UK via a dangerous journey or entered irregularly will normally be refused British citizenship. It will not matter how long they have lived here or how they have integrated into our society. Although there may be exceptional situations in which applications are approved, the Government have not provided clarity on how that discretion will be applied. It is understood that most applications will be rejected. Will the Minister provide clarity on how discretion will be applied?