Europeans Deprived Of UK Immigration Status Due To Crimes They Did Not Commit

Innocent European nationals are being deprived of British immigration status because of crimes they did not commit appearing on out-of-date Home Offie records, The Independent can reveal.

- May Bulman

Lawyers say hundreds of applicants for settled status have had their case put on hold – sometimes for years – due to pending prosecutions that do not exist. One Polish man’s case was paused for nearly two years – during which time he says he was driven to suicidal ideation over the fear of being deported – due to an allegation of fraud from 1999 which had since been quashed, but remained on his police records years later.

EU nationals and their family members living in the UK were required to apply for EU settlement by 31 June 2021 in order to maintain their immigration rights in Britain after Brexit. Some 6.4 million have applied to the scheme, of which 400,000 are still awaiting a decision. Home Office policy states that if an applicant has a pending prosecution which, if convicted, could be refused under “suitability grounds”, the application must be put on hold until the outcome of the prosecution is known.

More than 25,000 EU citizens in the UK have had their applications for EU settled status put on hold in the past three years on the basis that they have a prosecution pending, according to data obtained by Coram through freedom of information (FOI) laws. Legal advisers have told The Independent they estimate that hundreds if not thousands of these cases have been paused in error, due to records on the Police National Computer (PNC), a 47-year-old database which holds personal information on around 13.2 million UK residents, being out of date.