Katarzyna P. Gut, research assistant in the BRAD project, writes about her own application to the EU Settlement Scheme. Kat’s experience shows that the by-default automatic checks the Home Office carries out on the basis of the National Insurance Number do not provide a reliable source of information about the applicant’s period of residence in the UK. It is often the applicant who must evidence five-year residence to qualify for the more secure settled status, and this can be challenging even for a tech savvy.
As the UK prepares to end the European Freedom of Movement, European citizens living in the UK are expected to apply to the UK Home Office’s EU Settlement Scheme in order to keep their residence rights. That includes me. I have been living in the UK since January 2013. To be precise, from one very cold and dull Saturday evening when I entered this country and a new chapter of my life. Road was bumpy and not always straight but – as majority of young Eastern Europeans I just rolled up my sleeves and took up to work from the very beginning. I rarely was without a job, I was paying my taxes and contributing to NHS. I thought I was leaving behind traces of my legal residence in the UK. At some point, I also decided to undertake graduate studies and did one-year full-time master’s degree. Applying in the Settlement Scheme wasn’t much of a hassle – I’m a tech savvy roaming daily on a copious number of apps, so going through the Home Office application was smooth and intuitive. However, that’s me – nerdy and young. The process was going smoothly so it came as a shock that in the end… I was asked to provide evidence for 4 full years. Ironically, some of those years where the time when I had a permanent salary-based job! At that time, I was paying tax and contributed to NHS and pension. I felt a bit deflated. Where is all the data? No traces of my legal residence? There was also another thing… apart from digging out my old payslips (do I even have them?) I dreaded the perspective of digital acrobatics of pouring 4 year of my existence into maximum of 10 documents. It was at the end the February. Weeks passed and we were all swept away by the new reality dictated by the global pandemic. 2 months after my application I received a brief notification that it will be closed due to lack of documents. “I still have few days to complete the paperwork,” I thought, but that thought was buried with other, more urgent obligations. On the 6th of May my inbox registered a short update from the Home Office “We just closed your application.”
The recent report published by The Migration Observatory concludes that although the official estimate of 3.4m non-Irish EU citizens living in the UK have applied, we do not know how many of these people are still in the UK and how does it compare to the eligible population, because the Home Office data and the official ONS EU citizen population estimates are too different to be compared. The Migration Observatory presents a list of shortcomings in the statistical reports from the Home Office including failure to accurately count applications. This is because the Home Office IT system was not initially set up to be able to extract data on individuals, only on applications and grants. The figures also count people twice if they are eventually granted status after a failed initial application. My story illustrates how you can accidently become a part of this this false number. I was already counted once; I will be counted again when I apply for the second time, hopefully now with a positive outcome.