An influential House of Lords committee has urged Suella Braverman to step up efforts to protect the rights of vulnerable British citizens in the EU after the case of an elderly woman with dementia who was threatened with deportation from Sweden. It also said more needed to be done to ensure the rights of EU citizens in the UK – also guaranteed under the Brexit withdrawal agreement – were protected to prevent a “Windrush-type scenario”. Stewart Wood, acting chair of the European affairs committee, said: “As the passage of time since the UK’s exit from the EU grows, it is imperative that the rights of UK and EU citizens remain a top priority and continue to receive the highest political attention. In a nine-page letter to the home secretary, Lord Wood’s committee said they had been made aware of serious problems with residence schemes affecting British citizens who were already living in the EU before Brexit.
Issues included the implementation of the withdrawal agreement in Denmark and Sweden, where they were told that the refusal rate for British citizens applying for paperwork to stay in the country after Brexit was disproportionately high. Among those refused were Kathleen Poole, a 74-year-old British woman who cannot walk or talk and was threatened with deportation from Sweden because she did not have completed paperwork to stay in her care home. Her removal order has been frozen but only after her family went to the press, and the campaign group British in Europe brought her family’s plight to the attention of authorities in Stockholm and Brussels. The committee also heard of a British family of four with two young children who were also threatened with removal from Sweden; and British children facing difficulties in Malta when they turned 18. Peers told Braverman they were very concerned to hear that resources to support UK citizens in the EU had been scaled back substantially since 2021 with no official organisation to provide advice to the 1.32 million British people settled in the EU, and no statutory body monitoring the enforcement of the withdrawal agreement across the EU. This was despite the rise in serious and complex cases such as that of Poole. Several witnesses who gave evidence to the committee, including Sue Wilson, the chair of the Bremain in Spain campaign group, said the decision to close the UK nationals support fund meant many vulnerable people including pensioners in Spain might no longer be able to access the support they needed. Concerns were also raised about British nationals’ ability to travel within the Schengen area, with misunderstandings among border officials about the difference between holidaymakers and British residents in the EU under the withdrawal agreement. In relation to EU citizens in the UK, the committee pointed out that there was still a backlog of 181,000 EU citizens waiting for a decision on their applications for settled status. Peers told Braverman they heard applicants were being left in limbo, unable to apply for a provisional driving licence, get an EHIC card for holiday health insurance in the EU or access social rights. They told Braverman that in some cases EU citizens were being advised not to travel out of the country while decisions were pending, making them “effectively imprisoned in the UK”.