UK’s expat pensioners now safe, but will Brexit mean deportation for others?

Tommy Jones, living out his later years with the missus in their finca on the Costa del Sol, needs to be reassured that his pension from her majesty’s government in London will not disappear the day the UK leaves the EU.

And then there’s Mario Veronesi from Milan, working for a chemical company in Hull, and his daughter Maria, a student in Manchester, both worrying that their days in what they regard as their new home may be numbered.

About 3.5 million European Union nationals live in the United Kingdom, while about 1.2 million Brits have made their homes in the EU 27.

Only a couple of weeks ago 100 or so EU citizens living in England were shocked to receive a formal notice from the home office, telling them to leave immediately or face deportation. An "unfortunate error", the government claimed, revoking the notices immediately but doing little to remove the sense of a Brexit sword of Damocles hanging over whole communities.

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Key priority

Reassuring both UK citizens in the EU and EU citizens in the UK about how they will be treated on the day of Brexit is regarded by both sides as a key priority, and is one of the three strands in the preliminary divorce talks.

Last week the public focus was on the other two strands: Northern Ireland, where we saw significant progress; and the fraught "financial settlement" talks, where there was none. But slow progress was being made on a wide range of issues to do with the fates of Tommy, Mario and their ilk.

The former, it is now agreed, will still be able receive his UK pension and welfare entitlements after Brexit and keep hold of the European Health Insurance Card, or Ehic, which grants temporary access to healthcare services in any of the other 27 member states (plus Norway, Switzerland and Iceland). His social-security contributions will also continue to be respected.

Whether such rights to the Ehic will be extended to all UK citizens still living at home after Brexit is another, much bigger matter, one for the “future relationship” talks when they get under way.

And there is still some issue between the two sides about whether Tommy would be able to keep his Ehic should he decide he wants to move at a later stage from Spain to, say, Germany. Such rights would be reciprocated for EU citizens in the UK, who are, likewise, also promised a right of permanent residency, though the detail is yet to be resolved.

Professional qualifications

Citizens from both sides will be able to set up and own their own businesses in the country they are resident in after 2019, and discussions on recognising professional qualifications have agreed that degrees and diplomas will continue to be recognised by the other. The range of qualifications, from law and accountancy to anything from seafaring to animal slaughter, has yet to be defined.

What are defined as “frontier workers” – those who live on one side of the border and work on the other – will continue to be allowed to do so. About 30,000 such workers travel regularly to the UK, mostly from eastern Europe.

The range of such issues in the “citizens’ rights” talks strand alone is substantial, and the working group has produced a document mapping differences and agreements between the two sides. It runs to 16 pages, itemising 78 decisions and definitions to be agreed, of which at this stage 42 or so are deemed by mutual consent to be “converging”, 25 “diverging” and eight unclear.

Most of the really difficult questions remain unresolved, and whether the group can achieve the “sufficient progress” benchmark by October to allow the second round of talks even to begin is far from clear.