Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department plans to provide physical documentation for EU nationals with settled status to ensure they do not experience discrimination from prospective (a) employers and (b) landlords.

The Home Office’s intention is that EU citizens granted status under the EU settlement scheme will evidence their status and entitlements through digital means via online services. This will provide a simpler and more secure means to establish a person’s status and there are no plans to provide EU citizens with physical documents for this purpose.

The law is clear that employers and landlords should not discriminate when conducting statutory right to work and right to rent checks, and this is reinforced in statutory codes of practice issued by the Home Office.

EU citizens will be required to use the online service to evidence that they have status under the scheme when moving jobs or accommodation after the new immigration system is introduced. In the meantime, they can continue to rely on their national passports or identity documents. Anyone who believes that they have been discriminated against, either directly or indirectly, by an employer, or landlord, because of their race may bring a complaint before an Employment Tribunal, or an Industrial Tribunal in Northern Ireland.

“Race” is one of the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010 and the legal term incorporates colour, nationality or ethnic or national origins. When we consider the risk of discrimination by employers and landlords towards foreign nationals in the context of right to work and right to rent checks, race is the relevant protected characteristics we’re focusing on. Moreover, the Home Office has issued two statutory codes of practice for employers and landlords under the Immigration Acts setting out how they should avoid committing acts of unlawful race discrimination when conducting right to work and right to rent checks. The term race is explicitly used in both statutory codes.