How many EU citizens were granted settled status in May?

The Home Office has released its second set of figures on the UK-wide uptake of the EU Settlement Scheme. The information shows the total amount of applications from citizens from EEA and Switzerland who wish to remain in the UK after Brexit and covers the period up to the end of May 2019.

As before, the data is ‘experimental’, ie, not official, and the numbers have been rounded up. As a result, some of the percentages may not add up to 100.

The total number of applications is now 788,200 –  an increase of around 166,000 since the first release of statistics for the month of April.

During May, 223,000 registrations were successfully concluded.  Around 100,000 are still unconcluded, ie could have been submitted earlier in the year but are still not processed.

This works out at an average of 8,000 every working day during May. This is a drop in productivity from April 2019, when UKVI staff were dealing with as many as 19,000 applications every working day.

Of the citizens who have applied, two-thirds have been granted settled status and one-third pre-settled status.

As before, the majority of applicants were Polish, Romanian and Italian, and the geographical split across the four nations of the United Kingdom is roughly the same. The majority (73 per cent) are from residents of England, a third from those currently living in Scotland, a fifth from Wales and about a tenth from Northern Ireland.

We look forward to reading the more detailed report from the Office of National Statistics in August, which will be published at the same time as the latest data on migration.