New research has revealed that up to nine million people in the UK are at risk of having their British citizenship stripped, exposing what researchers describe as a deeply racialised and unequal system of citizenship.
The findings are published in Stripped: The Citizenship Divide, a new report by the Runnymede Trust and legal charity Reprieve. Drawing on updated census data, the Annual Population Survey and Home Office parental records, the analysis revises previous estimates upwards by three million people.
It shows that three in five people of colour are vulnerable under current citizenship laws, compared with just one in twenty white British people. People of colour are twelve times more likely to be at risk than their white peers.
Stark racial disparities
The report identifies a profound racial imbalance in how citizenship security is distributed in Britain.
Around 13 per cent of the UK population is now considered at risk of citizenship deprivation. When broken down by ethnicity, the disparities are stark:
- 62 per cent of Black British people (around 1.6 million)
- 62 per cent of people of “Other” ethnicity (around 700,000)
- 60 per cent of Asian British people (around 3.3 million)
By contrast, only 5 per cent of White British people (around 2.4 million) fall into the same category.
Researchers warn that these figures point to the emergence of a two-tier system of citizenship, in which the security of one’s status depends heavily on race, heritage and family background.
Warnings from civil society leaders
Shabna Begum, Chief Executive of the Runnymede Trust, said the findings reveal a disturbing direction of travel.
She warned of “a chilling undercurrent of citizenship stripping at the discretion of the Home Office,” under which almost two thirds of Black British and British Asian people are at risk.
She said the situation closely mirrors the conditions that led to the Windrush Scandal, adding that there are still no effective checks to prevent these powers being used widely.
Begum said citizenship is being reframed as something conditional rather than secure. She warned that successive governments have advanced a two-tier approach, where citizenship can be removed on the basis of perceived “good” or “bad” behaviour, with the consequences falling most heavily on people of colour. She questioned how such a shift has failed to trigger greater alarm in a democratic society.
Maya Foa, Chief Executive of Reprieve, said the findings should cause serious concern, particularly in the current political climate.
She warned that previous governments stripped British trafficking victims of citizenship for political gain, and that the current government has expanded these already extreme and secretive powers.
With the Reform party leading in the polls, she said the nine million people whose citizenship could be taken away by a future Home Secretary have every reason to be worried.
Foa said treating people with family connections to another country as second-class citizens is an affront to the British principle of equality before the law. “We are British, not Brit-ish,” she said, calling for the abolition of what she described as discriminatory powers.
Expanding executive powers
Under current law, the Home Secretary has the power to strip a person of British citizenship if they decide it would be “conducive to the public good”. This is a concentrated executive power, often exercised on the basis of secret evidence that the individual affected may never see or be able to challenge.
Any British citizen with dual nationality can be stripped of citizenship. Naturalised citizens may also be deprived if the Home Secretary has “reasonable grounds for believing” they could claim another nationality, even if they have never done so.
In practice, the report finds that these powers have been used against people with tenuous or non-existent links to another country, leaving some effectively stateless.
The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 further expanded these powers by allowing citizenship to be stripped without notifying the person affected. More recently, the Deprivation of Citizenship Orders (Effect during Appeal) Act, passed 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.
A modern and extreme development
The report places the UK’s approach in historical and international context.
Following the Second World War, mass citizenship deprivation was widely rejected across Europe as extreme and incompatible with the rule of law, particularly in light of Nazi Germany’s stripping of citizenship from Jewish citizens.
In the UK, between 1973 and 2002, there were no citizenship deprivations other than for fraud. Since 2010, however, more than 200 people have been stripped of their citizenship on “public good” grounds.
During this period, only Bahrain and Nicaragua have deprived more people of citizenship on this basis. No other G20 country engages in citizenship stripping at this scale.
Previous reports indicate that the vast majority of those affected are Muslim, with South Asian, Middle Eastern or North African heritage.
Calls for urgent reform
The report concludes that current legislation and practice have created a fundamentally racist citizenship regime, in which legal rights are less secure for people with migrant heritage and can be removed with little oversight.
In response, the Runnymede Trust and Reprieve are calling for:
- An immediate moratorium on citizenship deprivation for the “public good”
- The abolition of Section 40(2) of the British Nationality Act 1981
- The reinstatement of British citizenship for all those deprived under these powers
For communities already facing racial discrimination, the report warns that these sweeping powers represent a grave threat at a time when hostile rhetoric around migration and belonging is increasingly normalised in public life.