Siggi wrote:Christophe,
I don't undertsand what you mean by nationality legislation and immigration legislation no longer in step with each other.
The big question is when will this new crack pot idea be enforced?
All I meant was that, under the nationality laws, five years' legal residence in the UK is required for the "usual" route to naturalisation, but that most people now need to have six years' residence to qualify because, under the immigration laws, they can't get indefinite leave to remain (ILR) until the end of their fifth year of legal residence, and it is then in turn a requirement under the nationality laws to have ILR for a year before they can apply for naturalisation.
As I said it may not matter, but I suspect that it's a sign of woolly thinking on the part of the government. Until the government fiddled around with the legislation, the two sets of laws dove-tailed neatly together, which aided clarity and tended to minimise the need for people to apply for extensions to leave and the like.
I'm not of course saying that the immigration or nationality laws should never be changed, but rather that they should not be changed without all the implications of the changes being fully thought through. I'd also submit that it should rarely be necessary to change these pieces of legislation quickly or in a "knee-jerk" sort of way, which I think that this government has done on a number of occasions (and has then had to pick up the pieces with subsequent bits of secondary legislation or further regulatory changes to deal with messes of their own making).
That's all: it's more an academic point than a practical one, in a way, but unfortunately it's symptomatic, I'd say, of sloppiness and things not being properly though through, and this sloppiness has real effects on real people.
