EU nationals could lose resident rights

Tens of thousands of EU migrants could lose their right to be in the UK after Brexit without showing up in official data, a new report says.

It warned that unless the government has a clear plan for measuring whether EU nationals living in the country have received “settled status”, the precise number who fall through the gap may never be known.

The paper from the Migration Observatory at Oxford University said that based on currently available statistics, it will not be easy to calculate exactly how many miss out unless the numbers are very large.

“This is because we do not have precise figures on how many EU citizens are living in the UK and plan to stay,” the report said.

“It is possible that tens of thousands of EU citizens living in the UK could lose their legal status without this being clear from the data.”

Later this year the government will launch an online application system for EU nationals seeking to remain in the UK after Brexit.

EU citizens and family members who have been in the UK for five years by the end of 2020 will be able to apply for settled status, meaning they are free to live and work in the UK indefinitely.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory, said: “It’s reasonable to expect that even with a perfectly designed application and a great communications campaign, some EU citizens will fall through the gaps and fail to secure settled status.

She said that generating new data could “save a tremendous amount of effort later on”, and that this requires advance planning “right now”.

An online application system for EU nationals will be launched later this year.