The Conservative Party has proposed stripping some dual nationals of their British citizenship if they are convicted of serious crimes, as part of a wider plan to increase deportations of foreign offenders from the UK.
Under the proposal announced by shadow home secretary Chris Philp, people who hold another nationality, have lived in Britain for fewer than 15 years and receive a prison sentence of five years or more could lose their British citizenship.
The plan is not current UK law. It would only take effect if the Conservatives returned to government and introduced the necessary legal changes.
The party is also proposing to deport up to 40,000 foreign offenders a year, a substantial increase on current removal levels.
Who could be affected by the citizenship proposal?
The proposed policy would apply to a specific category of people rather than all migrants convicted of crimes.
It is aimed at dual nationals who have acquired British citizenship, have spent fewer than 15 years in the UK and are subsequently sentenced to at least five years in prison.
This distinction is important because a criminal conviction does not currently mean that a British citizen automatically loses their nationality.
The proposal would also raise questions about statelessness. In most cases, British citizenship cannot be removed if doing so would leave a person without any nationality.
Existing Home Office guidance allows the Home Secretary to deprive someone of British citizenship where doing so is considered “conducive to the public good”, subject to legal safeguards.
Those powers have mainly been used in exceptional cases involving matters such as national security, terrorism, war crimes and serious organised crime.
This means the UK already has powers to remove citizenship in some circumstances. The Conservative proposal would seek to make deprivation available more broadly to a defined group of dual-national offenders.
Losing citizenship would not mean immediate deportation
Even where citizenship is removed, deportation would not necessarily happen immediately.
Citizenship deprivation and physical removal from the UK are separate legal processes.
A person facing deprivation of citizenship can challenge the decision through the courts or relevant appeal system, depending on the circumstances of the case.
There may also be practical barriers to deportation, including disputes over travel documents, ongoing legal proceedings and whether another country agrees to receive the individual.
Philp has linked the Conservatives’ deportation plans to the party’s proposal for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Conservatives argue that withdrawing from the convention would make it easier to remove foreign offenders whose deportation is challenged on human-rights grounds.
That remains a political proposal rather than current government policy.
Conservatives target sharp rise in offender removals
The citizenship proposal sits within a wider Conservative plan to increase the removal of foreign offenders.
Official Home Office figures show that 21,294 foreign national offenders who were subject to deportation action were living in the community at the end of June 2026.
That was up from 18,993 a year earlier.
The Home Office said part of the increase followed changes under the Sentencing Act 2026, including wider use of suspended sentences and changes affecting the categories of foreign offenders covered by deportation rules.
Government data also show that 5,962 foreign national offenders were returned from the UK in the year ending June 2026.
A separate parliamentary answer said 11,733 foreign national offenders were returned between July 1, 2024 and July 31, 2026.
Against those figures, the Conservative target of up to 40,000 removals a year would represent a major increase in the number of people being deported.
The party has not yet set out all the operational details showing how quickly that target could be achieved or how much additional enforcement capacity would be required.
It is also unclear how many existing British citizens could meet the proposed criteria for citizenship deprivation.
What current UK law allows
British citizenship cannot currently be removed simply because someone has been convicted of a criminal offence.
Under Section 40 of the British Nationality Act 1981, citizenship can be taken away in certain circumstances, including where it was obtained through fraud, false representation or concealment of important information.
The Home Secretary may also deprive a person of citizenship where doing so is considered conducive to the public good and the legal conditions are satisfied.
Official figures provided to Parliament show that the power has been used relatively rarely in recent years.
Eight people were deprived of citizenship on conducive-to-the-public-good grounds in 2021, followed by three in 2022, two in 2023 and one in 2024.
Those figures show the gap between the existing case-by-case system and the broader approach now being proposed by the Conservatives.
What remains unclear
Several important details would need to be settled before the policy could become law.
These include exactly which offences would qualify, whether the five-year threshold would be based on the sentence imposed or time actually served, and how the proposed 15-year residence period would be calculated.
Questions would also remain over appeal rights, safeguards against statelessness and how the policy would interact with existing nationality and human-rights law.
These details would determine how widely the proposal could ultimately be applied.
What readers should know
For British citizens who also hold another nationality, nothing changes immediately because of the Conservative announcement.
It is an opposition policy proposal and does not automatically affect anyone’s current citizenship status.
The most important development to watch is whether the Conservatives provide further legal detail on eligibility, appeal rights and how the proposed citizenship rules would operate alongside existing deportation law.
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