The citizenship test has failed to achieve its original aims and purpose to ensure migrants can ‘integrate into society and play a full role in your local community’ as permanent residents and British citizens. Shortly after the test was launched, the government was confronted with evidence of its mistakes, inconsistencies and imbalances rendering it unfit for purpose. A few years later, the evidence grew that the test was not supporting integration and having a counterproductive effect.

The official response from 2013 to today has been to deny there was ever a problem. Ministers claim the ‘majority’ of feedback they have seen is positive, but they have never offered evidence of what feedback was received. There has never been an official review or consultation since the test launch in November 2005. The only apparent attempt at organizing feedback is from the administrator of the test, not the Home Office. Nor is there any effort to assess whether the ‘Life in the UK’ test does, in fact, promote British values and improve integration. It's almost like they’re afraid to look as it would show how much the test has veered off course from its original justifying aims in order to serve alternative, partisan and inexplicit ends. Perhaps the government hoped no one will notice.

The government claimed it ‘took into account feedback received from previous applicants and others who had provided comments on it’, but did not say if this was a formal exercise or noting what is said about the test in the press and academic commentary. I suspect it this was a reference to a comment made in 2013 about a ‘user survey’ of 664 people who took the second edition. On the basis of their expressing an apparent interest – the results of this exercise have never been made public nor referenced beyond this brief comment – in having more information ‘about history, government and the legal system’. And so the third edition attempted to do this, but admittedly without asking any one of them if it had succeeded in satisfying this recommendation. Worse, this is not what the third- edition handbook claims. It notes the handbook will give ‘a broad general knowledge of the culture, laws and history of the UK’ – adding in ‘culture’ and leaving out ‘government’.