Originally Posted by
Christopher
As I understand it (and I agree that the UKBA page is in places quite delightful in its vagueness), if you are the spouse of civil partner of a British citizen, the qualifying period of residence is 3 years and you must be settled (i.e., in this case, with indefinite leave to remain) in the UK on the date that you make your application for naturalisation.
For all others, the qualifying period is 5 years to gain settled status (indefinite leave to remain, or permanent residence if EU/EEA) and you must have held that status for 1 year before applying, making 6 years in total. (The exception to this 6 years would be people who are not British citizens but who have the right of abode in the UK, since they are deemed settled from the moment they arrive in the UK. They therefore do not need to wait the extra year.)
This would make sense, but of course the wording is very un-specific. I would not be surprised at all - in fact I would think it quite appropriate - if the government showed preference to the spouses of UK nationals over other EEA nationals. I cannot imagine any country could expect any less.
Originally Posted by
Christopher
The reason for this apparent mismatch and the extra year is that the previous government, in its wisdom, altered the legislation in such a way that the requirements for settled status and the requirements for naturalisation became "uncoupled" from each other. Whether the intention was in fact to extend the period needed to be eligible for naturalisation to 6 years or whether that was just an unintended consequence of the tinkering with the legislation is a good question.
Yes - I have become very aware of the uncoupling of granting of settled status and approval of naturalisation applications. The thresholds to meet either are in some cases very different, so that one can be entirely qualified for one and not the other, for no apparently good reason.
Originally Posted by
Christopher
The previous government had lots of complicated plans for naturalisation, such as "earned citizenship" and "provisional citizenship", all of which now seem to have been consigned to the dustbin of history — at least, we can hope so.
ISTR that one of the first things done by Teresa May was to announce the scrapping of Labour's plans for earned and provisional citizenship - like many things that the Labour government did in this area, it was well intentioned but impractical, unworkable and complicated, and would have required sizeable and expensive bureaucracy to adminster for arguably marginal benefit. Kind of symbolic for the whole Labour government, now that I think about it.
