Unsettled status for EU citizens

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/11/unsettled-status-for-eu-citizens

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Amelia Gentleman is spot-on (The long read, Journal, 8 October). Does the Home Office seriously believe that its EU settled status programme is fit for purpose? I am British and my wife is French. We married in 1969. My wife taught in the secondary sector for 28 years. She is in receipt of a teacher’s pension and a state pension. She holds a UK driving licence. She is on the electoral roll for local elections. She is joint owner of the property in which we have lived since 1980. Somewhat naively she assumed that her settled status would be confirmed once she inputted her national insurance number. Alas no. Additional documentation is required demonstrating residence for a five-year period. We are at present assembling the set of documents. However, we are told that P60s may not suffice since they do not prove residence. The Home Office seems to place a strange faith in council tax demands – who files them for safekeeping?

There is something truly Kafkaesque about requiring a woman in her 70s to prove that she has been living in her own home. Neither my wife nor I are in the best of health, and we are finding this process immensely dispiriting and unnecessarily stressful. Furthermore, like the lady in the article, we are of the pre-internet generation and have to rely completely on our grandson’s mobile phone and technical knowhow.

Do not believe the bromides and the platitudes. In practice this process is vicious and dehumanising. To be treated in this manner after half a century’s blameless residence in the UK is shameful.Prof Ceri CrossleyBirmingham

• The security minister, Brandon Lewis, has shown an unacceptable lack of understanding for the legal and psychological ordeal that EU citizens have been subjected to in the chaotic Brexit process (Get settled status or we will deport you, EU citizens told, 11 October).

EU citizens woke up on 24 June 2016 with a fear that their existing rights – to live and work, and develop socially and professionally in this country – had been taken away (subject to renegotiation). Treated as bargaining chips in the Brexit negotiations, their continuing anxiety was aggravated. Now this has confirmed their worst nightmare. There can be no certainty or assurances, their lives have been turned upside down.

The minister’s threats are deeply uninformed, too. Deportation would almost certainly violate the right to private and family life under article 8 of the European convention on human rights.

In October 2017 I had the privilege of appearing before the House of Lords’ EU justice sub-committee to argue that the continued state of uncertainty for EU citizens – let alone deportation – in itself violated article 8. The chair, Baroness Kennedy, was in full agreement. But she was also, quite rightly, keen to ensure we did not cause “alarm around the nation that expulsion [was] on the cards”.

It is deeply depressing – evidence of uncivilised behaviour and of indifference to citizens and their human rights – to hear now that expulsion is on the cards.Prof Dimitrios GiannoulopoulosGoldsmiths, University of London

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