One year to the deadline of the EU settlement scheme, what must the UK government do to prevent children from falling through the gaps?

Since November 2018 Coram Children’s Legal Centre has advised and supported hundreds of children and young people to secure their rights through the EU settlement scheme.

A year before the deadline of the scheme, Coram Children’s Legal Centres new report Children left out? Securing children’s rights to stay in the UK beyond Brexit draws from the lessons and experiences of this advice and casework. The cases we have supported are unusually complex, and as such, they provide insight into the glitches in the scheme, its blind spots and its blurred edges.

Which children are at risk?

These complex cases also foretell the kinds of applications which are likely to be still unresolved towards the end of the scheme when simpler applications have been neatly dealt with, as well as those that will still be yet to be made after the deadline because they have fallen through the cracks.

Children left out? focuses particularly on the needs of vulnerable children, including the unknown number of children eligible to apply who are in the criminal justice system, the estimated 5000 EU children are in local authority care, separated from their families, and children from outside the EU whose right to apply comes from a family member.

The report looks above all at what is needed to ensure that children are granted security and permanence through the EU settlement scheme and UK nationality law. Tens of thousands of European national children may already be eligible for British citizenship but without funded legal advice will not about their eligibility and how to apply, or may be prevented from doing so by exorbitant application fees – the fee to apply for a child to register as a British citizen is £1012.

Recommendations

The report makes concrete recommendations to the government and to local authorities, including:

1. The Home Office must take concrete action, including scrapping the £1012 fee, to help children who are entitled to British citizenship to understand and realise their rights.
2. The Home Office, Department for Education and Ministry of Justice must work with local authorities, the devolved administrations and civil society to make and resource a comprehensive plan to identify and support every single eligible child in care and care leaver, including those eligible to apply as family members of EEA citizens, as soon as possible.
3. The deadline to apply to the EU settlement scheme must be extended beyond 30 June 2021.
4. After the deadline, children and young people eligible under the EU settlement scheme must not be brought under the UK immigration system’s existing long and expensive routes that are currently failing other children and young people.

Read Children left out? Securing children’s rights to stay in the UK beyond Brexit

Read the executive summary

Read more about our work on Brexit and children’s rights