A Dutch woman who was told to leave the UK after living in the country for 24 years has now been informed she has the right to remain, a week after the Guardian publicised her plight.



The case of Monique Hawkins, who is married to a British man and has two British children, made headlines around Europe and provided a glimpse of the bureaucratic nightmare facing up to 3 million EU citizens who live in the UK post-Brexit.

Hawkins applied for a permanent residence card after the referendum because she feared her rights would be diminished when the UK left the European Union.

She is entitled to be in the UK but the Home Office required her to have the card before it would consider her rights to British citizenship.

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After four months she received a rejection letter from the Home Office and was told: “As you appear to have no alternative basis of stay in the United Kingdom you should now make arrangements to leave.”

In what Hawkins described as something out of a Monty Python sketch, her attempts to speak to anyone at the Home Office failed, as did a written complaint, which she was told was not valid under Home Office guidelines.

After resubmitting the 85-page application in early December, to her surprise, Hawkins received her card on Thursday.

“Not only did I get the PR [permanent residency] today, which took only three and a half weeks, including the Christmas bank holidays, I also received a courtesy phone call from a Home Office case worker checking if my PR has arrived,” she said.

“I am pleased that I can now finally start the citizenship process which I had wanted to start in June after the referendum.

“But there’s also a part of me that feels cross that the system has now given me such priority treatment, while at the same time many others are still facing long delays and uncertainty and rejections. It should not be the case that he who shouts loudest gets best results, the system should be fair and just for all.”

Her case shows how ill-equipped the Home Office will be if all EU citizens settled in the UK have to go through the permanent residency process. The Home Office has a backlog of 100,000 applications and says they can take up to six months to process. The3million, a group campaigning for the rights of EU citizens to remain in the country, has calculated that it could take 47 years to process 3 million applications at the current rate.

Hawkins’ first application failed because she made the innocent, but mistaken, presumption that a solicitor-verified copy of her passport would qualify as her ID. Applicants are allowed to withhold their original ID in exceptional circumstances, and Hawkins could not give up her passport for six months because her father had recently died and she needed to travel to the Netherlands to support her mother.

Since the publication of Hawkins’ case, the Guardian has been contacted by many other EU citizens who have received the letter advising them to prepare to leave. Some, like Lars Graefe, are unable to hand over their passport for six months for work reasons.

Others, including a nurse, said they had failed the process because they did not realise private health insurance was a requirement when they were not working, for example, while studying.

A British man married to a Dutch woman discovered she may not qualify to stay because she did not have private health insurance during the time she spent as the homemaker.

A Spanish lawyer who had the same experience as Hawkins told the Guardian that the fact the Home Office would not accept solicitor-certified copies of passports shows they did not trust the country’s own legal regulatory authority.

Hawkins said: “The solicitor-verified passport copy was not just seen as insufficient for the application, but was actually disbelieved – hence the wording suggesting I should make arrangements to leave the country, or else re-apply. I believe this to be unlawful.”

The immigration lawyer Jan Doerfel has said withholding an applicant’s passport for up to six months is a breach of their right to freedom of movement.

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The Home Office said it had recently launched an express passport check-in, whereby applicants can have their passports verified by authorities in 58 centres around the country. Hawkins said she tried this but was told by staff at her local centre that the service was not operational because they had not been trained. Express passport check-in also does not cater for some categories of applicants, for example homemakers.

Hawkins said: “I still believe that the Home Office was wrong in refusing my original application. The form contains a box for exceptions to providing an original passport or identity, which I properly complied with, giving a good reason, including a solicitor-verified photocopy, and telling them I would send the original as soon as they requested it when actually processing my application. Why include that box on the form, why not instead state that all applications without original passport or identity will simply be refused?

“Before resorting to going public with my story, I did try to put my arguments in writing, and tried to enlist the help of my MP, and wrote an official complaint to the Home Office, so there were several opportunities to have corrected the refusal.

“Although I now have my PR, I have not had an apology or a refund for the first refusal.”