“But I don’t know any barristers” – the case for scrapping the referee requirement for citizenship applications

Currently, anyone applying for British citizenship has to find two referees to vouch for their identity and confirm they are unaware of any reason why the applicant does not qualify for citizenship. Those referees can’t be just anyone – there are specific rules for who can be a referee for a citizenship application, which for some applicants can be extremely onerous.

This requirement dates back decades to a time before biometrics. A time when early man would hunt mammoth for food, sleep in a cave and not have to prove their identity by means of biometrics multiple times before even considering applying for citizenship. In many ways, a simpler time.

Now, however, someone who obtains indefinite leave in the partner route, for example, would have had their biometrics taken in their home country before they even stepped a foot on British soil, again at the extension application and then again at the settlement stage. As part of their naturalisation application, they will enrol their biometrics once more.

It’s hard to imagine how someone attempting identity theft could get through all of those measures, only to be foiled at the last hurdle by this antiquated requirement to have an upstanding member of the community sign a form confirming the applicant is who they say they are. Especially since people who decline to serve as a referee are not in any way required to inform the Home Office of this fact or, more importantly, why they refused to do so.

What is the referee requirement?

Anyone applying for citizenship, whether it be through registration or naturalisation, has to provide two referees to vouch for their identity and to a lesser extent, suitability. Even babies.

The main rules for both referees are that:

• they are not a relative, solicitor or agent of the applicant
• they are not employed by the Home Office
• they have not been convicted of an imprisonable offence in the past ten years
• they have known the applicant personally for more than three years
• they are not related to the other referee

One of the referees must have a job that falls on the list of “recognised professions” which includes being an airline pilot, articled clerk, barrister, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, chiropodist, Christian Science practitioner, designated premises supervisor, funeral director, insurance agent of a recognised company (only if full time), merchant navy officer, professional photogapher, surveyor, qualified travel agent or certain valuers and auctioneers.

The other referee must be British and either be over the age of 25 or have a job that appears in the above list.

When it comes to children, there is no requirement for the referee to have known them for three years (given that many of the applicants won’t have been alive for this long) but both referees must know the child professionally, e.g. they must be their teacher, nurse, etc. This in itself is a bit silly given that all babies look the same to everyone but their parents, but this is hardly the biggest criticism one can make of the regime.

If an applicant can find two suitable referees, they first have to collect a lot of private information from them including their date of birth, address, how long they have lived there and their passport number for the online form. The referees will also have to sign a declaration that confirms:

• That I am qualified to act as a referee.
• That the photograph above is a true likeness of the applicant.
• That I understand each of the points in the “Requirements of a referee” section.
• That, to the best of my knowledge, the details of the applicant given in this application are correct.
• That my details as a referee given in this application are correct.
• That I understand that I could be fined up to £5,000, or go to prison for up to 3 months, if I knowingly give false information.

So what’s the problem with this requirement?

You need to be friends with someone of a particular profession

It is difficult to pretend that there is no class bias to the list of acceptable professions. If I, as an Oxbridge-educated solicitor, needed to apply for citizenship, I would have no problems at all in finding two suitable referees. Even excluding my colleagues at work I would have over a dozen options of people whose professions fall on that list, including barristers and an MP.

For my client, however, who was brought to the UK as a teenager and succeeded in obtaining settlement under the pre-2012 discretionary leave rules but only after the Home Office lost her extension application, making her and her potential employers to incorrectly believe she was an overstayer during that time, it’s a much bigger ask. She doesn’t know any nurses or barristers or OBEs. She isn’t religious and doesn’t know any religious ministers. She isn’t friends with any journalists or opticians. She knows a solicitor – me – but I cannot serve as a referee because I know her professionally, not socially, and I’m assisting with the application.

For someone who meets all the other requirements of naturalisation to be denied British citizenship, which means the world to many applicants, simply because their friends are not sufficiently middle-class, is repugnant.

You need to be good at making and keeping friends

This point may not be as sexy as pointing out the inherent classism in this requirement but it still affects many applicants through no fault of their own. Some people are good at making friends, whether it be their colleagues or neighbours, and maintaining that relationship over three years to the point that their friends would be happy to share their personal details with them and vouch for their identity in a citizenship application.

Other people are different and find it more difficult to form those kinds of friendships, whether it’s because they have had to move jobs a number of times, they work in a toxic work environment, they simply don’t have the personality for it or because they have a condition or disability that makes this type of social bond building more challenging or in extreme cases, even means they cannot regularly leave their house. Not to mention that making friends as an adult is hard and even harder outside of your workplace.

Even where an applicant has made friends with someone suitable, that person may be uncomfortable with giving out this type of personal information to them or they might be intimidated by the prospect of interacting with the UK government in this way, even indirectly, especially given the threat of a three year prison sentence on the referee declaration.

There is no rational reason to deny someone citizenship just because they find it difficult to make friends, assuming they can prove their identity to the Home Office another way. Which they can, through biometrics.

It’s an unnecessary bureaucratic burden on applicants and their referees (and the Home Office)

The majority of citizenship applications are very straightforward and require minimal supporting evidence. Without the referee requirement, most such applications would be almost as simple as a passport application. Once you add the referee requirement, however, suddenly the applicant has to:

• identify two suitable referees,
• ask them for permission to use them as referees,
• explain to them what it entails,
• gather personal information about them for the form,
• take a passport-style photo of themselves and add it to each referee declaration, then add their name to each referee declaration
• send the referee declaration to their referee to sign and date,
• wait to receive the signed declaration,
• scan this in and upload it with the rest of the documents.

Upon receiving the application, once the Home Office has carried out its background checks. This includes checking their biometrics to ensure the applicant is who they say they are and reviewing their police record to ensure that there is no reason they would not qualify for citizenship because of bad character. The Home Office then theoretically have to jump through their own hoop of checking whether the referees the applicant has provided to confirm their identity and that they are not of bad character, also abide by all the rules for who can be a referee.

There is no rational reason for the Home Office, especially when they are understaffed and overworked, to have to go through this extra step in the hopes that this 1900’s-era measure of a person’s character will catch something that the biometrics and the Police National Computer have missed.

In his 2014 inspection of the Home Office’s handling of nationality casework, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration found that “the eligibility requirements in respect of referees were disregarded and played no part in the decision-making process”. The report went on to say:

Given the stringency of the referee requirements and the detailed nature of the checks implied by the application form and guidance to applicants, we were surprised to find that:

• referees were never contacted to verify that they had agreed to act as a referee, to determine their suitability, or to check that they had sufficient knowledge of the applicant; and
  • checks were not conducted to determine if referees had been convicted of an imprisonable offence in the last ten years, despite the guidance to applicants indicating that such an individual would not be accepted as a referee.

Although this inspection is over a decade old, I would be surprised if anything had changed since. In my own practice and from speaking to friends who work in this field, I have never heard of a referee being contacted by the Home Office for any reason. The only time I have ever been contacted about a referee my client put forward is the one time the Home Office felt their declaration was signed too long ago and they asked for this to be updated with a more recent date.

I can’t say I blame the Home Office one bit for failing to take seriously this outdated requirement that adds nothing to the security process of ensuring that only suitable applicants are granted citizenship. As far as I can see, the only reason this requirement has not yet been scrapped is not because of some kind of disagreement about its usefulness but simply because no one has bothered to get rid of it yet.

This requirement is so onerous that GPs no longer appear on the list of suitable professions after enough GPs lobbied the General Medical Council – their regulatory body – to ask to be taken off the list because they were tired of being harassed into doing this by patients they only saw for ten minutes at a time who had no other options for their citizenship applications. Arguably, many of the other professions on the list, like nurses and teachers, are just as busy and don’t appreciate having to deal with this on top of their other workload.

Conclusion

If we were able to scrap the police registration requirement – something equally onerous and equally unnecessary – there is no reason why we, as a society, cannot scrap this requirement too.

There is no political base hankering for more stringent referee requirements for permanent residents who apply for citizenship. The vast majority of the country doesn’t even know that this requirement exists. The Daily Mail is unlikely to run a headline story complaining about how immigrants no longer have to provide two referees when applying for citizenship if we get rid of it.

Immigrants want it scrapped. Their friends and acquaintances who are asked to be their referees want it scrapped. I am reluctant to speak for the Home Office but I’m pretty confident that the civil servants who decide citizenship applications also want it scrapped.

It’s time we stepped fully into the 21^st century and accept that the biometrics an applicant enrols multiple times in the course of their immigration journey is a better measure of one’s identity, and that the Police National Computer is a better resource for verifying an applicant’s criminal record, than some guy they know from work.