3.4mn EU citizens apply to stay in UK

The number of people who have applied to stay in the UK after Brexit under the EU settled status scheme now stands at about 3.4mn, the Home Office has revealed.

It puts the government close to its overall goal for the scheme, with estimates of the number of EU, EEA and Swiss citizens eligible to remain in the country lying between 3.4mn and 3.8mn.

However, monthly data published yesterday shows there is still a backlog of 320,000 applications and researchers at Oxford University have warned that many citizens may “fall through the cracks”.

EU citizens in children’s homes, care homes or those who are victims of domestic abuse, where others may not be aware or allow them to apply, have been cited previously as among those at risk.

Detailed breakdown provided by the Home Office shows there were 125,000 applications to the scheme in March.

This brought the overall number of applications received up to March 31 to 3,468,700, including approximately 180,000 non-EU nationals who are family members. The total number of applications concluded was 3,147,000.

Of those 58% were granted settled status and 41% granted presettled status.

Of the remaining applications 10,000 were invalid and 600 were refused, 98% of which were on eligibility grounds and 2% on “suitability grounds”, said the Home Office.

The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford said in a report, Not Settled Yet, published yesterday, that there was no way of verifying whether the government was reaching its goal because there was no official means of doing so, as no registration system existed before for migrants.

Madeleine Sumption, the director of the research unit, warned of the dangers that the government could relax into thinking it had captured data for all of those eligible to remain in the UK when many may not apply at all.

“The government has invested a lot of effort in making the EU settlement scheme easy to use,” she said, “but as with any scheme of this size it is inevitable that some people will fall through the cracks. It will be very hard to know to what extent this has happened, without a parallel investment in new data.

“For a host of reasons, it’s possible that the number of EU citizens granted status through the scheme could greatly exceed the current official estimate of 3.4mn but that wouldn’t necessarily mean the task is finished.”

The campaign group the3million said it had concerns that some of the more complex cases were now taking up to six months to resolve, creating anxiety for many families whose lives were put on hold.

It also expressed concern over the lack of information about refusals.