Schedule 1 - Citizenship ceremony, oath and pledge
Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill
9:00 pm
Mr Simon Hughes (North Southwark and Bermondsey, Liberal Democrat)
As long as it does not become as big a photo opportunity as Korean weddings, with as many as 50,000 couples being married in one go. That might be cheap, but the fees would not need to be high.
The Minister is right to decouple the ceremony from the test. I do not need a reply now, but I ask her to check with other Departments to find out what we could do to provide some sort of citizenship process for young people in this country. In the United States, children leaving high school have a graduation ceremony to celebrate the end of compulsory schooling, and that happens in other countries, including France. There may be a question about who is still at school at 16, but some process that recognises duty would be worth investigating. It would be good if Ministers looked into that.
Schedule 1 agreed to.