The pandemic made it amply clear that the cogs of daily life are kept in motion by frontline workers ‚- doctors, nurses, care home workers, and supermarket staff to name but a few. Our collective gratitude manifested in a routine of weekly applause proving our sense of fraternity. A key opportunity would be to extend this sense of fraternity by making British citizenship an accessible, achievable goal. A large proportion of frontline workers hail from other countries originally. For many, the option to naturalise as a British citizen is terribly expensive at ¬£1330 per adult and ¬£1012 per child, costing families thousands of pounds before any legal fees. This is also considerably more than equivalent applications in most other countries. It is believed that it costs the Home Office ¬£372 to process each citizenship application. Whilst it is appalling that these extortionate fees have been in place for so long, that these haven’t been revised in line with actual costs at a time of national crisis is nothing short of scandalous.
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