Polish, Romanian and Italian nationals living in the UK have been the most enthusiastic applicants to the government’s settled status scheme for EU citizens to secure their legal rights in the country post-Brexit, the Home Office has revealed.
The first statistics on the progress of the scheme, published by the department on Thursday, show that more than 750,000 of the 3.6m EU citizens in the UK had applied by the middle of May.
The programme, which rolled out nationwide in late March after regional pilots, grants “settled status” to EU nationals who have been in Britain for five years continuously and “pre-settled status” for those who have been in the country for less than five.
The figures show that by April 30 just over 100,000 Poles had applied, nearly 90,000 Romanians and more than 70,000 Italians. The Home Office said most applications take up to four days to process and that 99.9 per cent had been approved.
EU nationals with settled or pre-settled status will have access to the same rights and benefits they were entitled to under free movement, the Home Office said.
However, the House of Commons home affairs select committee warned on Thursday that huge numbers of EU nationals risked becoming disenfranchised because of failures in communicating with vulnerable individuals, and confusion over the consequences for those who do not apply before the June 2021 deadline.
The MPs suggested that EU nationals could be caught up in a rerun of last year’s Windrush scandal, which involved the wrongful detention and deportation of Caribbean nationals who arrived in the UK after the second world war.
Commenting on the figures, Sajid Javid, home secretary, described EU citizens as “friends, neighbours and colleagues who contribute so much to this country”. “Whatever the outcome of Brexit, we want them to stay,” he said.
He described the level of applications as “immensely encouraging,” and added, “I hope this early success continues in the coming months.”
The Home Office has spent £3.75m on a nationwide advertising campaign to encourage applications. The campaign, which covers 6,000 sites across the UK, involves billboard adverts as well as notices on TV, radio and social media.
Maike Bohn, co-founder of the 3million campaign group, which represents EU citizens living in the UK, said she had expected a surge of applications when the scheme first opened, and called on the Home Office to maintain its pace of processing.
“If the government fails to keep up the current application rate, we and other NGOs predict that hundreds of thousands of EU citizens will lose their legal rights to stay in the UK after June 2021,” she said.
Diane Abbott, Labour’s shadow home secretary, expressed concern that the total number of applications was still in the “low hundreds of thousands. Labour said it would favour a so-called declaratory scheme, which automatically granted settled status to all EU nationals currently in the UK without the need for an application.
