Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to help ensure that EU citizens who are resident in care homes in the UK are made aware of the requirement to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme.
Answered by Kevin Foster
The Home Office has provided £17million in grant funding to a network of 72 organisations which provide bespoke support to vulnerable and hard to reach EU citizens and their family members eligible to apply to the EUSS, including those who are resident in care homes or receiving some element of support from the care sector
On top of the £17million in grant funding, the Home Office recently announced a further £4.5million of funding to the 72 organisations to continue the support services well beyond the 30 June 2021 deadline.
Of the 72 Grant-funded Organisations (GFOs), 56 support the elderly to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme. These organisations are spread across the four nations.
In Scotland, Citizen’s Advice Scotland, have grant funding across their four consortiums, including thirty partner organisations who are working with 204 Care providers in the Clackmannanshire, Falkirk and Stirling local authority areas to target both EU citizens employed in the care sector, together with elderly EU citizens resident in care homes.
Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of requiring EU Nationals with settled status to update their passport details with the EU Settlement Scheme each time they renew their passport.
Answered by Kevin Foster
Holders of EU Settlement Scheme status are issued with a letter from the Home Office which provides clear instructions as to how and when individuals can update their details using the online service.
In addition to this relevant information is available on gov.uk by following this link:
We advise applicants to use the online Update Your Details service to update their passport information whenever it changes. When an update is made, the applicant will then use their new passport number to access their digital status.
Updating document details is advised, but not mandatory. Applicants can continue to log into their status using the document number they applied with.
Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to help make applicants to the EU Settled Status Scheme aware of the requirement to notify renewed passport details to that Scheme.
Answered by Kevin Foster
Holders of EU Settlement Scheme status are issued with a letter from the Home Office which provides clear instructions as to how and when individuals can update their details using the online service.
In addition to this relevant information is available on gov.uk by following this link:
We advise applicants to use the online Update Your Details service to update their passport information whenever it changes. When an update is made, the applicant will then use their new passport number to access their digital status.
Updating document details is advised, but not mandatory. Applicants can continue to log into their status using the document number they applied with.
Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to ensure that the rights of EU citizens to live and work in the UK are maintained in the event that those EU citizens have not been able to secure their status before the deadline for closure of the EU Settlement Scheme on 30 June 2021.
Answered by Kevin Foster
In line with the Withdrawal Agreement, EU citizens resident in the UK by the end of the transition period have until 30 June 2021 to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme, unless they have reasonable grounds for missing the deadline.
Those who apply before the deadline, but whose application is not decided until after it, will have their rights protected pending the outcome of their application (and of any appeal).
Where a person with reasonable grounds for missing the 30 June 2021 deadline applies to the scheme after the deadline and is granted status, they will, consistent with the Withdrawal Agreement, enjoy the same rights from the time they are granted status as someone who applied before the deadline.
Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to ensure that EU citizens are able to access support to obtain their status through the EU Settlement Scheme by the deadline of 30 June 2021 in light of the disruption caused by the covid-19 pandemic.
Answered by Kevin Foster
We have worked extensively to promote awareness of the EUSS. The Home Office has already spent a total of £4.6 million on marketing campaigns to encourage those EU citizens and their family members who have not yet applied to do so. We recently launched a new £1.5 million wave of UK-wide advertising to ensure EU citizens and their family members are aware of the deadline and know they need to apply.
Guidance on how to apply and details of the support available to applicants (as it has been throughout the pandemic), is available through the EU Settlement Resolution Centre (SRC), which is open seven days a week to provide assistance over the telephone and by email. The SRC also provides a direct line for organisations working with vulnerable groups. In specific cases the SRC has the capacity to transfer customers to Assisted Digital for more bespoke support.
As well as the above process of “warm transfer” customers from SRC to our supplier We-Are-Digital (WAD), we signpost customers to our supplier WAD for the Assisted Digital service, which is available cost-free for customers who cannot access or struggle to use technology.
We remain committed to making sure everybody eligible for the EUSS can apply, including those who are vulnerable or need extra support. We have already awarded £17 million of funding to a network of now 72 organisations across the UK, to ensure important information and assistance gets through to those who are hardest to reach, and no one is left behind. These organisations have helped more than 250,000 vulnerable people to apply to the EUSS already.
In addition, we recently announced a further £4.5 million for the Grant Funded Network so it can continue to provide a wide range of invaluable support across the UK, including after the 30 June deadline, ensuring those most at-risk continue to get the help they need.
Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of updating the Government's passport renewal website to make applicants aware that they can enter a family or friend's email address if they do not have an email address themselves.
Answered by Kevin Foster
While people can provide the email address of a third party as part of their online passport application, for security purposes Her Majesty’s Passport Office strongly recommends the use of a personal email address. As such, there are no plans to change the guidance relating to this.
Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment she has made of the length of response times for decisions on visa applications.
Answered by Kevin Foster
Data on visa processing times, including the percentage and number of visas that are processed within service standards, is usually published at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/migration-transparency-data. However, due to Covid-19, it has not been possible to prepare and quality assure all of the data tables which usually make up the publication. Priority has therefore been given to those with the highest degree of public interest. We anticipate that all Q1 2020 data will be published as part of the Q2 2020 publication in August.
On 28 May the Home Office published a statistical report on the impact of Covid-19 on the immigration system, up to April 2020, which shows the impact on the visa system. This report can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/statistics-relating-to-covid-19-and-the-immigration-system-may-2020.
Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what percentage of her Department's work force has been seconded to other departments during the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by James Brokenshire
Based on the central data we hold, the Home Office has deployed 431 people to other government departments to support COVID-19 work. At 10 June 2020, this represents 1.23% of the workforce.
Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the oral contribution of the Secretary of State for International Development of 2 October 2019, Official Report column 1205, when she plans to (a) publish the timescale for informing local authority and civil society partners of and (b) begin supporting those organisations to prepare for that commitment to resettle 5,000 refugees every year post-2020.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
We are grateful to the many local authorities and civil society organisations who have participated in the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS). Through the collective goodwill and efforts of all involved over 17,000 vulnerable refugees fleeing conflict have now found safety in the UK to rebuild their lives.
Delivery of our resettlement schemes has relied strongly on the principles of collaboration and co-design between central and local government and other partners. We continue to engage closely with regional Strategic Migration Partnerships (SMP), local authorities and other stakeholders as we collectively prepare to transition to the new resettlement scheme in 2020.
Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment he has made of problems with the EU Settlement Scheme application system not recognising diacritical markings, such as umlauts, in EU nationals' names; and what plans he has to resolve those problems.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
The Home Office is putting in place measures to ensure that the EU Settle-ment Scheme is streamlined, user-friendly and accessible to all prospective applicants. We attempt to eliminate perceived errors translating special char-acters by using technology to read data direct from the passport Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) – the text at the bottom of a passport and passport chip.
The MRZ does not include special characters such as diacritical marks and neither does the chip in the document. This is in line with International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standard for passports that all EU passports adhere to. The ICAO standard provides translation matrices for each marking to the English alphabet. However, in some cases there are options that can be chosen for the same letter with diacritical marks, so transforming the name back to one with diacritical marks can be complex. We feel it is im-portant that a person’s online status should reflect their true name with dia-critical marks, something that does not happen where physical documents are issued.
However, as diacritical marks are not recognised or recorded across govern-ment and other public services (where names are often recorded from the name in the MRZ of the passport), the matching to this data is less affected, though it also depends upon how employers enter the name of the employee.
The beta test phases have provided us with a useful opportunity to prove var-ious elements of the scheme functionality and we continue to refine the han-dling of special characters including how this could apply retrospectively to any applicants who may want their data to be corrected.