Sunday, August 30, 2009

Visit to UK Border Agency to discuss citizenship ceremonies

At a recent citizenship ceremony in Liverpool I met up with Tony Dalton of the UK Border Agency who runs the whole citizenship ceremony service for the UK. He is based in Liverpool by happy chance and invited me to have a look round their offices, meet some of his staff and talk about the ceremonies and how they might evolve.

They were very welcoming and explained the system thoroughly. We then had a really useful chat about the future of ceremonies, I took the opportunity to describe some of the improvements we have already made in Liverpool. I am going to work with them on the future of the service, what works well and what we might want to change.

For instance, I am campaigning to get rid of the word "tolerance" from future services. And we would like to involve a greater number of the ordinary general public and particularly children and young people, in future ceremonies.

It was fascinating and I look forward to helping them to develop this further.

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