I, too, do not seek to detain the House for long on this Bill. It is a rare day indeed when I agree with something that the Immigration Minister is bringing forward—let us get that point down and hope we never return to it again. [Laughter.]

The SNP welcomes the Bill for the clarity it will bring, particularly given the confusion that has been caused by different approaches taken by the Home Office on the question of what “settled” means in the context of free movement. I am reassured by the briefing that we received from the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens, the3million, the Immigration Law Practitioners Association and Amnesty International, which also welcomes the Bill. The way in which the Home Office has consulted with them on it is welcome and something the Home Office ought to be doing more often. The briefing states:

“We are grateful to the Home Office for consulting with us immediately prior to this Bill’s introduction. Nonetheless, the history of this matter provides a further example of our concerns that British citizenship, and British nationality law from which the right to citizenship is derived, has been badly mistreated by successive Governments over a period of some decades. This is but one stark example.”

So before the Government get too much into slapping themselves on the back for this Bill, they should be cognisant of the fact that many issues associated with citizenship remain, many of which we will see in our surgeries, as local MPs.

I do not seek to reiterate what others have said, but I am concerned at the lack of official statistics identified in the equality impact assessment. It mentions 167,000 children born to EEA mothers between 1983 and 2000, but there are an unknown number of grandchildren also in this cohort. So what further work are the Government doing both to identify these people to let them know what their rights are and what they should do, and to make sure that Home Office and Passport Office officials who are making the decisions are also very clear about the situation. The lack of clarity over this has been a real problem. It should be the case that everybody, when applying for their first passport, knows that they are doing so properly and have the right to do so to avoid any confusion. There is nothing worse than people applying for passports and then there being an unexpected delay in the process. We are coming into that season where we will get those kinds of inquiries.

I understand from the Library briefing that the Home Office had stopped issuing first-time British passports to people affected by this, so it would be useful to hear from the Minister exactly how many people are in this paused group and what will be happening now to ensure that they get their passports. I expect that there has been some delay involved as a result of that passport being paused—people will not have been able to travel or do the things that they wanted to do and they will want to know when they will get those passports once the process restarts. It would be useful to have a picture of exactly how many people are affected, and I am sure that the Passport Office will have those figures.

I also note that the equality impact assessment references “The Windrush Lessons Learned Review” of Wendy Williams. This uncertainty around status speaks to some of the difficulties caused for the Windrush generation, but as the UK Government have ditched some of their commitments on upholding the principles from the review, can we be assured that the confusion that has led up to this point will not be recreated in a new EEA Windrush? People who have the right to be here, who have settled status, and who have the right to apply for a British passport should face no further impediment or confusion in applying for their passport.

In closing, there is a lot more that the Government need to do to improve the processes around citizenship and applying for passports and to make sure that there is a clearer, simpler, cheaper and more effective route to citizenship in the UK. I am certain that an independent Scotland will seek to make that route much clearer, much simpler and better so that people have the right to be here and can fully participate as Scottish citizens in an independent Scotland, and I look forward to that day.