The EU Rights and Brexit Hub is the first of its kind: a nation-wide, legal action research hub. It is an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, multi-method three-year project investigating how Brexit affects the social rights of EU & EEA nationals in the UK. It is funded by an ESRC large Governance After Brexit Grant.

The project brings together three key strands:

(i) We have set up a legal action research clinic, based within, and drawing upon the excellent resources of The Baroness Hale Legal Clinic based at York Law School. We are looking in particular at problems encountered when accessing public services, giving second-tier advice and drafting support to organisations working with EU nationals in the UK. We are also conducting a parallel advice-led ethnography, a methodology pioneered by the EU Rights Project, documenting the cases that we encounter. We want to ask: how well are EU nationals’ rights protected? Do they face administrative obstacles or discrimination when accessing public services? How are EU rights asserted (or jeopardised) in post-EU law?

(ii) Alongside the advice-led ethnography, we will conduct interviews with MPs and Peers; MEPs; NGOs and key governance stakeholders. These interviews (conducted by in the Department of Politics, University of York) will gather further information about systemic problems, and also analyse the reactions to the issues raised within the clinic. We will look for recurrent themes in terms of perceptions, experiences and responses.

(iii) To put the findings from the clinic and interviews into context, we will analyse statistical data on variables that affect EU nationals’ access to public services. This work (based in the Migration Observatory, at the University of Oxford), includes a review on the data and literature on migrants’ interactions with public services and benefits. It will further bring together different national surveys and datasets (such as DWP and HMRC data on benefit claims; the Annual Population Survey (APS); and Home Office statistics) to identify the numbers and characteristics of people interacting with the systems analysed – so giving some insight into the potential scale of problems or barriers identified within the project.

Together these elements will form a rich analysis of the effects of Brexit upon EU nationals' rights. In gathering data from around the UK on how Brexit plays out in EU nationals' relationships with UK public services, and on institutional practices that impede access to justice for EU nationals, while offering expertise to nationwide networks of legal advisers, we hope to build on the success of the EU Rights Project, but have greater reach and a larger range of qualitative and quantitative data. We hope this national hub will be a European leader for legal action research and for socio-legal approaches to EU citizens’ rights.

Many excellent NGOs are conducting work on the problems EU nationals face acquiring settled/pre-settled status. Our project complements this work, examining the barriers encountered when accessing rights that are supposed to attach to that status.