Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, for what reason the Government's original estimate of 3 million EU Settlement Scheme applications has been surpassed by a further 2 million of those applications.

Each application to the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) is considered on its individual merits.

The Impact Assessment for the EUSS (March 2019) is available at:

The Immigration and Nationality (Fees) (Refund, Waiver and Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 (legislation.gov.uk)

This discussed the assumptions, risks, uncertainties and exclusions surrounding its estimate of eligible citizens and made clear it should be considered as indicative and not as minimum and maximum estimates.

The estimate of EEA citizens and their family members who were potentially eligible for the EUSS, made for the Impact Assessment, was primarily based on ONS Annual Population Survey (APS) data, which estimates the resident population, adjusted to estimate how the resident population would change in the future. It therefore cannot be directly compared to the number applications made to the EUSS.