Lord Alton of Liverpool – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Alton of Liverpool on 2016-03-03.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the difficulties that refugee children face in accessing legal advice or paying the fee required to register their citizenship; whether legal aid is available for those purposes; what the current fee is for registering citizenship; what proportion of that fee represents profit accumulated by the Home Office; whether they have plans to increase that fee, and if so, by how much.
Lord Bates
Civil legal aid remains available for advice and representation in relation to applications and appeals for asylum. The majority of unaccompanied refugee children applying for permission to remain in the UK will be seeking asylum, and legal aid will therefore be available. For non-asylum immigration matters and citizenship applications, legal aid is generally not available, although may be provided exceptionally where required by the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Government has committed to review the legal aid provisions within the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 within 3-5 years of implementation.
The current fee for a child to register as a British citizen is £749. The estimated unit cost to process this application is currently £223. For 2016/17 the fee will increase to £936 on 18th March 2016 with a rise in estimated unit cost to £272. The power to set fees that are higher than the cost of processing applications is contained within The Immigration Act 2014, which provides that the Home Office may take into account not just the cost of processing an application, but also the benefits and entitlements available to an individual if their application is successful and the cost of exercising any other function in connection with immigration or nationality.
The Home Office does not provide exceptions to the requirement to pay application fees for naturalisation or registration as a British citizen. This is because the Home Office considers that citizenship is not a necessary pre-requisite to enable a person to exercise his or her rights in the UK in line with the European Convention on Human Rights.
British nationality applications are not mandatory and many individuals with Indefinite Leave to Remain decide not to apply. A person who has Indefinite Leave to Remain may continue to live in the UK and travel abroad using their existing valid passport and residence permit, visa or travel document.
