United Kingdom

KEY ISSUES 

• The UK has a statelessness determination procedure that can lead to a grant of a 5-year residence permit with a route to settlement and subsequent qualification to apply for naturalisation. However, applicants do not have a guaranteed right to stay in the UK, rendering them liable for removal and at risk of detention; and there are procedural and evidential hurdles that affect recognition as a stateless person.  
• Stateless people lack access to facilitated naturalisation procedures, and the fee set for acquiring nationality is prohibitively expensive (including for stateless children). A fee waiver introduced in June 2022 is available for children for whom the fee is unaffordable, but it may be difficult for some to access.  
• Successive changes to the law over the past 20 years have expanded nationality deprivation powers – increasing the scope of who can be targeted, re-introducing the possibility to render an individual stateless, bestowing more discretion upon the Home Secretary, weakening judicial oversight and eroding procedural protections. 

STATELESSNESS IN THE UK 

The UK is a state party to both the 1954 and 1961 statelessness conventions and introduced a statelessness determination procedure in 2013 that enables the grant of a 5-year residence permit (prior to that procedures regarding issue of travel documents, child registration and deprivation of nationality referred to the 1954 Convention definition of a stateless person). Nevertheless, there remain significant gaps in law, policy and practice that result in the failure to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of all stateless persons and every child’s right to acquire a nationality. Successive changes to the law over the past 20 years have expanded nationality deprivation powers, including by re-introducing the possibility to render an individual stateless.  

Statelessness occurs predominantly in a migratory context in the UK. The government collects various data on the stateless population, including: those granted a residence permit (“leave to remain”) under the statelessness determination procedure, stateless people with other types of residence permit, who were born in the UK, or who are held in immigration detention. However, not all statistics are published and the data is not analysed or presented in a way that enables a full and accurate understanding of the stateless population in the UK. The UK census does not count stateless people and only asks what passport a person holds. UNHCR reported 4,547 stateless people in the UK at the end of 2023.  

The UK’s statelessness determination procedure enables stateless people to have their status recognised and apply for leave to remain, and provides a right to work, homelessness assistance, student loans for tertiary education and free non-emergency healthcare as well as a route to naturalisation. People who have applied for a residence permit on the grounds of statelessness are in a non-suspensive procedure. In practice, there is no evidence of new decisions to detain nor remove them until a decision has been made on the application. People who are clearly at risk of statelessness but who have not applied for a residence permit are often subject to futile removal efforts and lengthy immigration. As such, stateless people do not enjoy the same protections as compared to applicants for asylum or complementary (“humanitarian”) protection, and there is also an absence of appeal rights, free legal assistance, and access to social and economic rights such as the right to work while awaiting determination of their status. Statelessness is also determined by officials trained to different levels in the contexts of: asylum procedures, the issuance of a stateless person travel document to those with a UK residence permit, the registration of stateless people as British, deprivation of British citizenship, detention and deportation.  

Stateless people in the UK can face a number of human rights challenges that are directly linked to their lack of immigration status. These range from destitution and homelessness to a heightened risk of arbitrary detention particularly where procedural safeguards to identify and determine statelessness and related barriers to removal are lacking. Due to the lack of a time limit on detention they can be detained for disproportionate amounts of time. Laws introduced in 2023 and 2024 have considerably extended powers to detain and reduced judicial oversight of detention. 

RIGHT TO NATIONALITY IN THE UK 

Nationality Law in the UK is governed by the 1981 British Nationality Act and is a mixture of jus soli and jus sanguinis. A child born in the UK acquires citizenship at birth if at least one parent is a British citizen or is a permanent resident in the UK. Citizenship is acquired by descent if a child is born outside the UK to a parent who holds British citizenship by means other than descent (i.e. transmission of citizenship is limited to the first generation born abroad). British nationality law contains safeguards to prevent statelessness in the case of foundlings, adopted children and children born in the UK or abroad to British nationals if they would otherwise be stateless.  

To access British citizenship under the special rules for stateless children, the law provides that the Secretary of State must be “satisfied” that the child is unable to acquire another nationality before they can register as a British citizen (stateless people aged 18 to 21 do not need to fulfil this requirement). The British Nationality Act provides in Sch.2 s3 that such children can apply to become a British citizen if they were born in the UK, have always been stateless, have lived in the UK for the last five years and have not been out of the country for more than 450 days in the five-year period. The entering into force of the Illegal Migration Act may affect this route to British citizenship for stateless children, if born to a person who entered the UK irregularly after 7 March 2023. While the Act does not explicitly bar such children’s applications for citizenship, if removal provisions are implemented, the Act could result in the removal of parents of stateless children born in the UK (and the children with them) who have not yet reached age 5 and thus not acquired British citizenship. Such families will potentially qualify for an exception from the application of the Act on human rights grounds, but many will likely struggle to find adequate legal advice. There are also other options for children to acquire British citizenship, not specifically for stateless children, but available to them. For example, children born in the UK may become eligible for citizenship if either parent become settled or naturalises, or if they live in the UK for the first 10 years of their lives, if other criteria are met.  

Naturalisation is not facilitated for stateless people. Adults are eligible to apply for naturalisation after five years’ lawful residence and one additional year of permanent residence (regardless of the grounds for the residence permit), and must pay the same high fees as other applicants to acquire British citizenship. A 'good character' requirement is imposed, and there are citizenship and language tests, which can be waived in certain exceptional circumstances, but not on grounds of statelessness. Applicants for British citizenship face prohibitive application fees. However, as a result of litigation and related campaigning, a fee exemption was introduced for children in care in June 2022 and the Home Office policy is now to waive the fee where the applicant demonstrates the fee is unaffordable.  

UK law, provides the Secretary of State with the power to revoke British nationality, including on national security grounds. These powers have been expanded through successive legislative amendments since 2002. In certain circumstances, deprivation of nationality is permitted even if this would result in statelessness.  

STATELESSNESS DETERMINATION IN THE UK 

The UK’s statelessness determination procedure leading to a grant of a residence permit is established under the Immigration Rules and the UK Government’s interpretation of the Rules is in its published guidance. Data is not regularly published on applications or decisions made on grants of residence permits, despite UNHCR’s recommendations. Detailed figures have been made available through Freedom of Information Requests. For example, between 1 January 2018 and 30 September 2021 a total of 3,244 applications were made; but only 232 people were granted a residence permit under the procedure and a total of 2,949 people were refused.  

A dedicated and centralised Statelessness Team within the UK Government Visas and Immigration (Home Office) is responsible for examining all applications for a residence permit under the procedure (“statelessness leave applications”). However, the UK’s procedure falls short of UNHCR guidelines in a number of ways. The burden of proof rests with the applicant, rather than being shared. Decision-makers are obliged by government guidance to carry out research and enquiries, particularly where the applicant is ‘unable’ to do so and where the information available is lacking or inconclusive. However, an audit conducted by UNHCR, covering decision-making in the UK procedure between 2016-2019, revealed that some decision-makers fail to make efforts to investigate an individual’s nationality status, even when the applicant has already done everything they can to evidence their case. The standard of proof in the UK procedure is “balance of probabilities”, which is higher than in asylum applications. The procedure to request a residence permit applies to children without adaptation from the general procedure, and the burden of proof remains with the child. Moreover, the requirement to interview has been weakened in successive versions of the guidance for decision makers.  

The UK’s failure to recognise statelessness as a protection issue means that for residence permit applications, there is neither a statutory right of appeal to an independent tribunal, nor free legal assistance in England and Wales (unless “exceptional case funding” is granted). Legal aid is available in Scotland and Northern Ireland. There is no timeframe for decisions set in law, and lengthy waiting times were highlighted in the UNHCR audit, which found that applications routinely take 18-24 months to decideIn 2019, the Committee Against Torture noted that individuals claiming statelessness status in the UK continue to be subjected to lengthy periods of arbitrary administrative detention, due to the UK’s cumbersome procedure for requesting a residence permit. 

The content on this page was reviewed by Judith Carter, Solicitor and Lecturer at the University of Liverpool Law Clinic 

[Last updated: December 2023] 

Cover image by Matthew Daniels