Stripped: The Citizenship Divide by Runnymede Trust
New research has exposed the racist reality of UK citizenship stripping laws, revealing that up to nine million people are vulnerable to having their British citizenship removed—three million more than previously estimated. People of colour are twelve times more likely to be at risk than their white peers.
The report, Stripped: The Citizenship Divide, draws on new census data, the Annual Population Survey, and Home Office parental records to bring estimates up to date. It reveals a stark racial disparity: three in five people of colour are vulnerable to being deprived of citizenship, compared with just one in twenty of their white neighbours.
Shabna Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust, said there is a “chilling undercurrent” to citizenship stripping at the discretion of the Home Office. She warned that almost two-thirds of Black British and British Asian people are at risk of having their UK citizenship removed, describing this as an extremely concerning trajectory. Drawing parallels with the legislation that led to the Windrush scandal, she noted the absence of effective checks to prevent these powers from being used widely.
“Citizenship is a right, not a privilege,” she said. “Yet successive governments are advancing a two-tiered approach to citizenship, setting a dangerous precedent that someone’s citizenship can be removed on ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behaviour, with the reality that these powers impact people of colour most. How has our democracy become so degraded that this is not treated with the alarm it deserves?”
Maya Foa, CEO of Reprieve, said that the previous government stripped British trafficking victims of citizenship for political gain, and that the current government has expanded these extreme and secretive powers. With Reform leading in the polls, she warned that the nine million people whose rights could be removed by a future Home Secretary have every reason to be concerned.
“Treating people with a family connection to another country as second-class citizens is an affront to the foundational British principle of equality before the law,” she said. “We are British, not Brit-ish. These discriminatory powers must be abolished.”
The analysis concludes that legislation and government practice have created a fundamentally racist, two-tier citizenship regime. Under current laws, the Home Secretary may strip citizenship if they determine it to be “conducive to the public good”. This represents highly concentrated executive power, exercised based on secret evidence that the affected person may never see or challenge.
Any British citizen with dual nationality can be stripped of citizenship. Naturalised British citizens may also be deprived of citizenship if the Home Secretary has “reasonable grounds for believing” they may be able to claim a second nationality, whether or not they have done so. In practice, these powers have been used against people with tenuous or non-existent claims to another nationality, leaving them effectively stateless.
The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 grants the Home Secretary the power to strip a person of citizenship without notifying them. The Deprivation of Citizenship Orders (Effect during Appeal) Act, passed by the current government in October 2025, means that even where a court finds the Home Secretary acted unlawfully, citizenship is not restored until all government appeals are exhausted—a process that can take many years.
As a result, the legal rights of people with connections to another country are less secure than those without such ties and can be removed with the stroke of a pen.
The analysis shows that around 13% of the UK population is at risk of citizenship deprivation. Broken down by ethnicity, 62% of Black British people (1.6 million), 62% of people categorised as of ‘Other’ ethnicity (0.7 million), and 60% of Asian British people (3.3 million) are at risk, compared with just 5% of White British people (2.4 million).
Mass deprivation of citizenship by the UK government is a modern phenomenon. Following the Second World War, the practice was widely rejected across Europe as extreme and incompatible with the rule of law, particularly in light of the Nazi regime’s stripping of Jewish citizens’ nationality. From 1973 to 2002, there were no UK citizenship deprivations other than for fraud. Since 2010, however, more than 200 people have been stripped of citizenship on grounds of “public good.” During this period, only Bahrain and Nicaragua have deprived more people of citizenship on this basis, and no other G20 country strips citizenship in bulk. Previous reports indicate that the majority of those deprived are Muslim people with South Asian, Middle Eastern, or North African heritage.
For communities at risk, these broad and extreme powers are a source of grave concern, particularly at a time when racist sentiment is increasingly expressed and endorsed by political and media figures. The Conservative Party has floated proposals to deport large numbers of legally settled people, Reform has pledged to deport more than half a million people if elected, and prominent nationalist voices have called for the expanded use of citizenship deprivation powers.
In light of these findings, the Runnymede Trust and Reprieve are calling for an immediate moratorium on the use of citizenship deprivation powers on “public good” grounds, the abolition of Section 40(2) of the British Nationality Act 1981, and the reinstatement of British citizenship for all those who have been deprived of it under these provisions.
Read the full publication here.