Home Affairs select committee report

The Home Office is not ready to deliver its proposed Brexit policy, says a damning report published by the Home Affairs Select Committee. 

The cross-party group, led by Yvette Cooper MP, warned that there are still many ‘key questions’ to be answered about immigration during the transition period and beyond, but not enough resources nor trained staff to deliver the changes in time.

• This will affect the three million citizens from the EEA (European Economic Area) who reside in the UK. They have less than a year to register their ‘settled’ status, but no clear guidance about how to do so.
• The status of the 230,000 EU nationals expected to arrive after March 29, 2019 is also still in doubt. Prime Minister Theresa May cautioned earlier this year that they will not have an automatic right to remain.

The Select Committee also criticised the indefinite delay to a White Paper setting out the Home Office’s plans to manage immigration through Brexit and beyond as ‘extremely regrettable’.

They expressed concern ‘that we do not have clarity about what the government actually wants the rules, rights and registration for new arrivals after 2019 to look like, and we do not even know what the government is seeking to achieve from the negotiations in this area.’

It also urged the Home Office to confirm that it will have necessary IT systems ‘developed, in place and operating efficiently by the end of March 2019’.

The Home Office issued an angry rebuttal to the Select Committee, assuring them they are ready for Britain to leave the EU:

‘It is ridiculous to suggest that we are not preparing sufficiently. It is precisely for this reason that we have already invested £60 million in 2017/18, are recruiting an additional 1,500 staff across the immigration and borders system and are well advanced in the development of a new scheme to give EU citizens currently in the right to stay after Brexit.’

The warnings from the Home Affairs Select Committee report come along criticism of a proposed online app, which was supposed to supersede the current 85-page document that EU nationals fill in to apply for residence. A European campaign group condemned this digital, voluntary replacement as impractical for people who don’t have access to a computer or are disabled.

‘It will only work for the digital generation’, says Nicolas Hatton, co-founder of the3million. ‘We will still need a face-to-face solution alongside this.’