Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 12 July 2022 to Question 30043 on Immigration: EU Nationals, what steps she is taking to increase the level of satisfaction among landlords at the system for EU citizens with settled or pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme to prove that they have the right to reside in the UK.

The Immigration Act 2014 put in place a requirement for landlords to make simple checks on tenants to evidence their right to rent property in the UK. The 2014 Act applies the Right to Rent Scheme to the whole of the UK, however it is currently in force in England only. No decisions have been taken on rolling out the scheme to the rest of the UK.

Providing immigration status information online has enabled us to simplify and standardise the system of checks for landlords, by providing information about an individual’s status in a format which is easy to understand and accessible to all users, removing the need for checkers to interpret various types of physical documents, complex legal terminology or confusing abbreviations.

We are committed to reviewing feedback on our services and, where necessary, making improvements. Feedback and user satisfaction scores for checkers and migrants are collected from our gov.uk services and are published as a part of our transparency data on a quarterly basis:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/home-office-data-q1-2022

We analyse and review this feedback monthly and use it to improve the service. We also collate and conduct trend analysis on incidents which are reported to us by checkers and status holders in order to make improvements.

For example, we have added a prefix to the share code which users provide to checkers when they wish to share their status. This makes it clear whether a share code is generated for a right to work or right to rent check so landlords and employers can quickly determine if they have the right type of code. We also extended the validity of share codes from 30 to 90 days following feedback they expired too quickly.

We are also improving the multiple check process in response to checker feedback, adding a button which will take checkers to the start of the process, rather than forcing them to navigate backwards after making each check. This improvement is currently live in the View and Prove service, and we will add it to the right to rent and right to work check services shortly.