Bin the referee requirement in British citizenship applications
You need 2 people — who’ve known you for a while, who work in a certain job, and who are okay giving you their personal information — to verify your identity if you want to apply for British citizenship. It’s an absurd and exclusionary requirement that needs to be scrapped.
What the referee requirement is
As with my previous posts, when I speak about the citizenship process, I’ll be referring to how I applied, which is as someone who had indefinite leave to remain for at least a year.
One of the requirements in the British citizenship application was to get 2 people to verify your identity by signing a piece of paper with your picture on it.
The Home Office is very particular about who these 2 people can be:
- both need to have known you for at least 3 years
- both cannot be related to you
- one can be someone of any nationality but who has ‘professional standing’
- the other person has to be a British citizen who either has ‘professional standing’ or is over 25 years old
What does having ‘professional standing’ mean?
It’s essentially means having a very middle-class job, like an accountant, teacher, or lawyer.
See the list of suggested professions on the GOV.UK website (Note: this is a page for passport applications, but the citizenship guidance takes you to this list.)
On top of finding people in your life that meet those requirements, you need to make sure they are people who are okay telling you lots of their personal details for you to include in your citizenship application, like their:
- address
- date of birth
- phone number
- email address
- British passport number (if they have one)
Worried I wouldn’t find a referee with an acceptable job
When I first looked into the requirements for British citizenship a few years back, I remember skimming the list of accepted professions and feeling nervous about the fact that I didn’t know anyone in those types of jobs.
I work in UX, so a field with relatively new job titles compared to the ones on that list. Do the people I work with count as having ‘professional standing’?
The GOV.UK guidance does say that their list is not exhaustive, but it also doesn’t give you any indication of what other jobs might count.
It was only when talking to someone who applied for British citizenship and they mentioned you could use a manager that I looked again at the list and saw you could use a director or manager of a VAT registered charity or company. Managers, I know those!
Nervous to ask for personal details
I had known my manager, who I asked to be one of my referees, for 7 years at the time of applying. Even having worked together for so long, I was still nervous to ask him for so many personal details to include in my application.
I also asked my close friend (and former co-worker) I had known for 5 years at the time. I was still nervous to ask him.
Of course, being the wonderful people they are who knew about how awful my immigration experience was, they were more than happy to support me in my citizenship application.
But it made me reflect on how I’m not sure I would have met this requirement if I was someone who had regularly changed jobs and not someone who had been with the same employers my entire career.
If I had changed jobs in the last 3 years, I probably would have had to get in touch out of the blue with a manager I worked with previously and be like, “hey, can I have your passport number so I can get citizenship?” That’s such an uncomfortable thing to ask someone!
You can have met all the other requirements but might be barred from applying because you haven’t formed relationships with people in certain types of jobs over a certain number of years and still keep in touch with them.
It is so exclusionary. Being able to access full rights in this country should not depend on other people.
The GOV.UK site doesn’t list the referee requirement on their main pages
On top of the referee requirement being exclusionary, the Home Office doesn’t even list it as a requirement on their main webpages about the process!
The eligibility page lists the residency requirement, but not the referee one.
So how would you find out about this requirement?
Well, of course, by reading the massive PDF document on guidance they link you to.
(Side note: as mentioned in my last post, the PDF has been converted into a webpage since I applied. But also as I said in my last post, a PDF converted into a webpage is a really long page that’s difficult to navigate as well.)
Finding referees who meet the specifications is already hard enough. In the UK citizenship process, you also have to deal with requirements being hidden away, creating even more barriers to people trying to apply.
This isn’t about verifying identity
Finally, I have to wonder why after 4 previous applications to the Home Office, they needed this requirement to verify my identity.
Did sending the Home Office my passport, residency permits, and other documentation all these years not do enough to verify my identity?
I had to go to an in-person biometrics appointment for this application. Could someone not have verified my identity then?
I ask these questions, but when it comes down to it, I’m pretty sure I know the answer. I don’t think this requirement has anything to do with verifying identity. It’s to intentionally keep people from applying.
Bin the referee requirement
The referee requirement is best summed up in this post from Edgewater Legal:
[Providing referees is] a slightly outdated notion, and the kind of process you might expect when joining a country club.
This observation is spot-on. Like a country club, UK citizenship is ridiculously expensive and requires people to essentially vet you.
Except you’re not joining some exclusive club. You’re trying to access the same rights as everyone else in the place you call home.
It’s absurd and exclusionary.
It inhibits people’s access to British citizenship if they don’t know ‘the right people’.
It needs to go.
It’s time to bin the referee requirement in citizenship applications.
My UK citizenship experience blog posts
This is my fourth post in a series about my experience applying for UK citizenship.
Read the other posts in this series:
- I applied for British citizenship out of fear
- The disconnect between services in the UK citizenship process
- The lack of clarity in how to prove residency in the UK citizenship application
All text from the Government referenced in this post was as it was written at the time I was interacting with this content in November 2022.
My next (and final) post is coming out in July.
