'We must not betray Hong Kong residents who have a right to come to Britain Five years ago, we made a pledge to those fleeing Beijing’s draconian law. It is time to honour it', Lord Patten of Barnes

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the launch of the British National (Overseas) or ‘BNO’ visa scheme. In 2020, following the imposition of Beijing’s draconian National Security Law in Hong Kong, the UK government announced a new visa scheme that would allow BNO passport holders in Hong Kong to come to the United Kingdom and gain settled status after five years, plus citizenship a year later.  

This anniversary should be a cause for celebration. Unfortunately, it is overshadowed by the uncertainty surrounding proposed changes to the BNO visa scheme. The BNO scheme has been caught up in the Home Office’s attempts to tighten the requirements for new migrants to gain settled status. 

The Home Office is proposing new eligibility requirements for settled status, a proposal that it calls ‘earned settlement’. These new requirements – to demonstrate annual earnings of at least £12,570 for three years and to pass CEFR B2 or ‘upper intermediate’ English test – are designed to show that migrants are able to both contribute economically and integrate culturally. On the face of it, these requirements are eminently reasonable – indeed, many might think them not tough enough. 

However, for many BNO families, these new requirements are a tripwire introduced just as they are about to apply for settled status. Many BNOs came to the UK with sizable assets from the sale of property in Hong Kong and private savings from their white-collar careers. With this financial cushion, many BNO mothers – and some fathers – have chosen to care full-time for their children, rather than go out to work. Many older BNOs opted to take early retirement – understandably preferring to live off their savings than compete for work as over-50s in an unfamiliar job market. 

Under the original rules, these were sensible decisions. Adaptation to a new country takes time – improving one’s language skills to a professional level, reskilling, settling children into a new education system. What makes the new earnings requirement so unfair is not that it is draconian, but that it retrospectively changes the rules of the game. In football terms – the Prime Minister’s favourite metaphor – BNO parents and older BNOs have played by the rules all the way to the final whistle, only to find the rulebook has been written over in haste by the Government at the 89th minute. 

The B2 language requirement - up from B1 ‘lower intermediate’ - is a similar story. Given time to prepare, many BNOs would surely be able to pass B2-level English. However, they find themselves suddenly required to pass a much higher language standard after being told for five years that B1 level English would be sufficient. 

The Home Office says that settlement – and British citizenship – is a privilege, not a right, and that migrants to the UK must be prepared to earn that status. As a general principle for migration policy, this is entirely fair. It must, however, seem somewhat insulting to BNOs to be told that they must ‘earn’ their British citizenship. 

Who knows better than BNOs the value of British citizenship? Hong Kongers were stripped of their UK citizenship after the handover in 1997. They had no choice in the matter. In lieu of British citizenship, the UK offered residents of colonial Hong Kong a British passport that would confer nationality, but not citizenship or residency rights. Thus, the British National (Overseas) status was born. 

Some 24 years later, the Government offered these British nationals the chance to regain the UK citizenship they had lost, via the BNO visa scheme. Now, that offer is being snatched away again – with BNOs being told they have to ‘earn’, or more accurately, ‘re-earn’ their UK citizenship, by demonstrating three years’ compliance with rules that have quite literally just been made up. 

This is simply unfair. BNOs chose to maintain their links to Britain, for decades after the UK left Hong Kong. They put their trust in the UK that, unlike the People’s Republic of China, it would honour its promises. They opted to live in a free society even if it meant rebuilding their lives from scratch. Let us keep to the promise we made to BNOs in 2021, and impose no additional requirements on their pathway to settled status in the UK. They have earned it.

This article was published in The Telegraph on 31 January.

Photo: Diliff, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons