Citizenship test ‘just bad pub quiz’

A test taken by around 150,000 would-be British citizens each year is just a “bad pub quiz” with too much focus on culture and history at the expense of practical knowledge, an academic has said.

The Life In The UK test, which must be passed to qualify for indefinite leave to remain in Britain, does not require practical necessities in everyday life, Durham University’s Dr Thom Brooks said.

But it is required that new citizens know “trivial” facts such as the year Emperor Claudius invaded Britain, the year that Sake Dean Mahomet launched the first curry house and the age of Big Ben.

Dr Brooks, a US immigrant who sat and passed the test in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2009, becoming a British citizen in 2011, said the test is a key part of immigration policy but is “unfit for purpose” in its current form.

“The Life In The UK test has become a bad pub quiz. It has gone from testing practical trivia to the purely trivial and is a major opportunity lost,” he said.

“The biggest surprise is the lack of attention successive governments have paid to ensuring the test is fair and not out of date, a surprise even bigger than the sometimes-shocking questions that can be found on the test,” said Dr Brooks, of Durham Law School. “Many citizens that were born and bred in the UK would struggle to know the answers to many of these questions.

The latest edition launched on March 25 and was based on the third edition of the handbook Life In The United Kingdom.