Will we ever know how many EU citizens living in the UK lose their pre-settled status?

As Brexit is implemented, major focus of the immigration debate has been how many people are applying to secure their residence rights by applying to the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS).

While the attention has all been on headline numbers – almost 4.5m applications had been concluded by the end of December 2020 – there is another challenge that receives much less attention. So far, over 1.9m EU citizens and their family members have been granted pre-settled status.

This status allows them to live, work and study in the UK for up to 5 years. If they want to remain beyond that point, they must reapply to EUSS to secure settled status, which is permanent. If they do not, they become irregular migrants and may start to find themselves being denied access to work, housing and public services, or even being removed from the UK.

Whether people with pre-settled status will successfully ‘convert’ to full settled status is thus quite an important question. It is also one that is likely to be very difficult to measure and evaluate, for several reasons.

First, individuals do not always understand their own immigration status. For example, during early testing of EUSS, around 12,750 of the 200,000 applicants “mistakenly believed that they had documented PR status or existing ILR” (Home Office, 2019), when in fact they held a different type of status such as a registration certificate.

This raises the question whether EU citizens with pre-settled status will understand that their status is temporary and that they are set to lose it if they do not reapply to the EUSS to be granted settled status later. The Home Office has said that it will remind applicants before their pre-settled status expires (Home Office, 2018), though it is possible that not all will be easily contacted.

Second, unlike the initial EUSS application, there will not be a single deadline for people to upgrade to settled status. Instead, there will be many different deadlines depending on when the person made their initial application. This makes public communication around the need to apply harder.

Third, the evidence requirements for settled status are in practice more stringent than for pre-settled status. This is because an applicant who is not covered by the automated checks and lacks the necessary paperwork to prove their residence can currently receive pre-settled status with just one piece of evidence, such as a single invoice issued in the past six months; however, once the main EUSS deadlines have passed, applicants will need a full five years of evidence retrospectively to qualify for settled status. This may be difficult for some of the vulnerable groups that are considered most at risk of falling through the cracks of the EU settlement scheme.

The data required to monitor transitions from pre-settled to settled status are currently not published by the Home Office. This is because there are no statistics on grants of settled status to people who already held pre-settled status. These data will be important in the future for understanding the experience of people who receive pre-settled status.

Even if and when these data materialise, it will still be difficult to know whether significant numbers of people have ‘fallen off’ the path from pre-settled to settled status. Currently the Home Office does not publish figures on the number of people who upgrade from pre-settled to settled status, although not doing so will become increasingly unsustainable as time progresses. (The headline application figures actually include some double counting as a person who receives pre-settled status and later settled status will be included twice; this is currently still expected to be a small share of the total but will increase over time.)

Even if data on conversions from pre-settled to settled status are published, there will still be challenges understanding the situation. This is because we should expect that some people granted pre-settled status will leave the UK and no longer need settled status. Published emigration statistics do not identify these people, so it will not necessarily be clear how many there are. For example, imagine that by time the deadline arrived, 2 million people had been granted pre-settled status, and new statistics showed that five years after the deadline, 1.5 million of those had upgraded to settled status. It would not be immediately obvious how many of the remaining 500,000 had left the country (or died or perhaps received status under another immigration route such as a work visa) vs. remained in the UK but failed to reapply and thus lost their residence status.

In theory it would be possible to develop new data sources to look at this issue, as I outline in a recent report. This could be done by linking Home Office information on migrants’ status to other data sources that indicate whether migrants are still living in the country (e.g. tax and benefits records). Such data sources exist in other countries, such as Canada, and have been immensely valuable in evaluating immigration policy.

With the current set of available statistics, there will be no way of assessing whether substantial numbers of people with pre-settled status failed to upgrade to settled status over the next five years, even though they still live in the UK. Individual cases of people who find that they have become irregular migrants without realising it may start to emerge and receive publicity, but it could be very difficult to understand the scale of the phenomenon.

This commentary is drawn from the author’s April 2020 report, “Not Settled Yet: Understanding the EU Settlement Scheme Using the Available Data”.

References

Home Office, 2018. EU Settlement Scheme: Statement of Intent. London: Home Office

Home Office, 2019. EU Settlement Scheme private beta testing phase 2 report. London: Home Office.