EU students told health insurance 'a technicality' after German woman threatened with removal
|
Version 0 of 1. The Home Office has insisted it will not deport EU students if they do not have private healthcare, despite the fact that a German PhD student was told she would be at risk of removal if she could not produce medical insurance documentation at Heathrow. The categorical assurance is a departure from previous Home Office statements. It will assuage growing fears among students and other categories of EU nationals including stay-at-home parents that they were at risk of removal for not complying with a hitherto little-known requirement to have “comprehensive sickness insurance” (CSI) to qualify for residency in the UK. The statement was issued less than a week after an official from the UK visas and immigration office warned Andrea Blendl, who is a student in the Orkney Islands, that she might not be able to get back into the country if she went to a conference to Sweden. Now, in a significant development the Home Office says this will not be acted upon. “EU citizens will not be removed from the UK or refused entry solely because they do not have comprehensive sickness insurance,” said a spokesman. The news comes after the Guardian highlighted the case of Jet Cooper, a Dutch woman living in Devon for 30 years and supported by her British husband, who had been told by the immigration minister, Robert Goodwill, that she might not qualify to stay after Brexit because she did not have the health insurance and might not have earned enough as a freelancer. Blendl is studying Viking and other medieval runic scripts and sought advice prior to the trip last week. She was shocked to learn two days into her trip that immigration officers could stop her and check she was carrying healthcare documents, as mandated under EU law. In an email from the UK visas and immigration office to managers at the University of the Highlands and Islands, she was told that if “a student attempting to exercise treaty rights [to live in the UK] does not hold either CSI or EHIC [a European Health Insurance Card for tourist health cover] they will be liable for removal from the UK”. “If a student attempts to enter the UK then the immigration officer should establish whether they are required to provide either documentation. If they do and cannot they are likely to be refused entry,” the email continued. Blendl said she “feared the worst” and, although she was distracted by the conference, she had two sleepless nights in Malmö before returning to the UK. When she arrived in Heathrow, she was stopped at passport control. “I have never been stopped at the airport before and this time I was. They asked me where I had come from and where I was going. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life,” she said. “But then they just let me go through. Maybe they are just asking people more questions because of Brexit, but because of my heightened anxiety, I was expecting the worst.” Blendl, 31, said she had never heard of CSI until recently and that she had sought advice from managers at the University of Highlands and Islands before taking the research post last September because she was worried the referendum might have changed the situation for EU students. She was told there was no need to do anything other than sign up with a local GP in Kirkwall. Blendl said she would be happy to pay a health surcharge similar to that applied to students from outside the European Economic Area, who since 2015 have been asked to pay £150 a year, but this is not an option available to EU students. The CSI rule is mandated by a 2004 EU directive but the blanket regulation failed to take account of the fact that Britain’s health service is not insurance-funded. The European commission launched an infringement procedure against the UK for not treating the NHS as CSI in 2012, telling the UK: “This breaches EU law.” However it never progressed the case because of the threat of a referendum on EU membership. There is no known case of the Home Office enforcing the CSI rule even though there are more than 120,000 EU students in the UK. Immigration barrister Colin Yeo, who has been blogging about the issue said the Home Office statement was “good news and very welcome”. However he said the Home Office position did not make sense if its legal position was that those without the right to reside under the directive could be removed. “But it is obviously very welcome and will be very reassuring to EU citizens in this position,” he said. Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Dem MP for Orkney and Shetland said the Home Office was in “complete meltdown when it comes to EU citizens living in the UK”, describing Blendl’s experience as another example of the “disarray” people were facing from UK officials. The Home Office has already amended some of the language it uses in communications with EU citizens. Last year, another Dutch woman, Monique Hawkins, made global headlines after she was told to “prepare to leave” the UK even though she had been in the country for 24 years, was married to a British man and had two British children. The Home Office now no longer uses this language, telling those who are refused permanent residency that this does not mean they have to leave the country. |