Demonstrators protest in support of the Windrush generation on April 20, 2018 in London | Chris J. Ratcliffe/Getty Images UK reassures EU over ‘Windrush’ Caribbean migrant scandal Home Office briefs EU diplomats on how it would avoid similar problems post Brexit and acknowledges ‘psychological impact’ on EU citizens.

The U.K.'s Home Office held a briefing for EU diplomats in London Friday at which it admitted failures in how it had dealt with the immigration status of Caribbean migrants and reassured them the same would not happen to EU27 citizens post Brexit.

Some members of the so-called Windrush generation — named after the Empire Windrush ship that brought the first group of migrants en masse from former colonies in the Caribbean — say they have struggled to access health care, lost their jobs or been threatened with deportation because of demands for paperwork they cannot provide. Many arrived in the U.K. as far back as the 1940s and have lived in the U.K. ever since.

Prime Minister Theresa May apologized last week over the affair and Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced to MPs Monday that anyone from the Windrush generation who wanted it would be granted British citizenship. She also promised to compensate people who had suffered loss as a result of Home Office mistakes.

The scandal has raised fears in Brussels that EU27 citizens currently living in the U.K. may suffer similar treatment when trying to take advantage of the "settled status" promised to them by the British government. The European Parliament's Brexit coordinator Guy Verhofstadt last week said the situation is "deeply worrying."

At a regular home affairs briefing with EU diplomats and Commission representatives in London on Friday, the Home Office's head of strategy and architecture, Simon Bond, set out the government's commitment to avoid a similar situation for EU27 citizens post Brexit.

“We are developing from scratch a new streamlined, user-friendly scheme for EU citizens to safeguard their right to stay in the U.K. after we leave the EU" — Home Office spokesperson

"The Home Office admitted they had made mistakes in the Windrush case," said one senior EU diplomat who attended the briefing. "They acknowledged that there is a big problem there and reiterated Rudd’s commitment to fix it as fast as possible."

An official at a second EU embassy in London said that U.K. government officials had acknowledged the “psychological impact” that the Windrush scandal may have had on EU citizens, anxious about their own residency status in the country after Brexit.

They offered reassurance to embassy staff that the process of formalizing EU citizens’ immigration statuses in the U.K. would be a “very different situation” to the Windrush episode, the second EU embassy official said, adding that it was clear the U.K. is “taking on board the concerns” of EU citizens.

The first EU diplomat said the U.K. government's plan to avoid similar problems for EU27 citizens included starting "from a presumption of legality of the residency and not from a presumption of illegality of the residency as has been the case so far."

A third EU diplomat at the meeting confirmed that the U.K. officials offered "lots of reassuring messages from U.K. government that they will be positively disposed towards EU citizens” and that "they were very conscious of member states’ concerns."

A Home Office spokesperson declined to comment specifically on the Friday briefing but said that every EU citizen resident in the U.K. when the Brexit transition period ends will be eligible for some form of leave to remain, subject to criminality check. “We are developing from scratch a new streamlined, user-friendly scheme for EU citizens to safeguard their right to stay in the U.K. after we leave the EU.

"We have committed to ensuring that applications will not be refused on minor technicalities and that caseworkers processing applications will exercise discretion in favour of the applicant where appropriate," the spokesperson said.

This article was updated on April 23 to include a comment from a Home Office spokesperson.