This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The Home Office has reached an out-of-court settlement with a charity that had threatened a judicial review over the registration system for EU citizens.

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) agreed to drop its application for a judicial review after Sajid Javid’s department made changes to its guidance to caseworkers in relation to vulnerable citizens.

Solicitors for the JCWI say they believe it is the first substantive challenge to Brexit legislation.

The Public Law Project, which acted on the JCWI’s behalf, said: “Following key concessions to the claim by the home secretary, JCWI have today withdrawn their claim.”

It said the agreement would have implications for hundreds of thousands of citizens nervous about their status because they were elderly, a carer, a stay-at-home parent, mentally ill, a student, homeless or out of work through no fault of their own.

As part of the settlement, the government has expressly confirmed that it will not refuse settled status to anyone who is “economically inactive”, works part-time or lacks private health insurance.

The government has also amended rules that would have allowed Home Office caseworkers to refuse settled status to EU citizens who had previously been served with a removal notice.

The JCWI cited the case of a Polish worker who had become homeless after a serious accident at work and who was at risk of being removed despite not having been in the UK illegally.

The Home Office will also be forced to check the current circumstances of anyone who had been served a deportation order more than two years before to see if they are actually a threat to the country.

“Quite a lot of politicians were saying that settled status was easy and all you had to do is demonstrate you were not involved in serious or persistent criminality,” said Sara Lomri, a solicitor with the Public Law Project.

She said the Home Office had not defined what “serious” meant and that there was a vast difference between someone who had a motoring offence and someone who had committed murder.

Lowri said that some deportation orders may have no longer applied to someone’s circumstances but they might not have had the means to challenge the government at the time.

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Zoe Gardner, a JCWI policy adviser, said the settlement meant “better safeguards would be in place to prevent them being removed post-Brexit because, for example, they had a period out of work, or when they weren’t paying comprehensive health insurance”.

Under the settlement the Home Office has updated its guidance to caseworkers, advising them they cannot refuse applicants for settled status on the grounds of a deportation order served more than two years ago.

They must first establishing whether there has been “a material change or circumstances and/or that removal continues to be justified on the grounds of public policy, public scrutiny or public health”.

A Home Office spokesman said the settled status scheme was launched on a trial basis and it was “always looking for ways to grant status and have now further clarified our caseworker guidance”.

It is the government’s second out-of-court settlement in a week after the Department for Transport signed a £33m damages deal with Eurotunnel over its Brexit ferry fiasco.