For Fabio, a 33-year-old Italian engineer who arrived in London in 2018 to pursue a PhD and has since built a career and a life there, the letter from the Home Office arrived like a verdict on everything he had carefully constructed. It informed him that his settled status — the permanent residency granted to EU citizens after five years under the post-Brexit EU Settlement Scheme — had been issued in error. The consequences were immediate and concrete: he risked losing the withdrawal agreement rights that allow his wife to live with him in the United Kingdom. “It was quite devastating for both of us,” he told the Guardian. “We have done everything by the book, and we’ve always felt very welcome here.”
Fabio is not alone. A Home Office minister has confirmed that the government contacted 1,473 individuals holding post-Brexit residency rights to notify them that the original decision to grant that status was made in error. The policy, enacted in late 2025, has only recently come to public attention, and the scale of its application is still emerging. Campaign group the3million, which advocates for EU citizens in the UK, says it is aware of at least 50 cases and has placed the Home Office on formal notice that it intends to seek a judicial review.
The legal and human stakes are considerable. The withdrawal agreement, concluded between the United Kingdom and the European Union following Brexit, enshrines specific protections for EU citizens who were resident in the UK before the transition period ended. The3million argues that the Home Office’s retroactive rescissions constitute a clear breach of that treaty framework. “In many cases, the Home Office is actually wrong to say there was a mistake,” the group stated in its appeal for legal funding. “People whose status was properly granted are now fighting not to lose it.”
At the centre of the dispute is a question of nationality and documentation. A number of those targeted are Brazilians and others who hold dual Italian nationality by birth. The Home Office has argued that because these individuals did not submit passports with their original applications, they were not demonstrably Italian at the time they applied for pre-settled or settled status. The logic, stripped of its bureaucratic language, amounts to this: a passport received after Brexit is treated as the moment citizenship began, rather than as evidence of citizenship that predated it.
That reasoning has already collapsed in at least one case. The Home Office recently conceded before an administrative court that it was wrong to claim a claimant’s pre-settled status had been granted in error, and further acknowledged that the receipt of a physical Italian passport after Brexit did not constitute the origin date of her Italian citizenship. The concession is significant, but it resolves only one case. For Fabio and the hundreds of others still in limbo, no equivalent acknowledgment has arrived. “Despite being hopeful, we are still in a limbo as we started an appeal process and haven’t received any communication from the Home Office regarding the fact that they are now conceding their mistake,” he said.
The material consequences for those caught in this bureaucratic suspension are not abstract. An NHS worker also in receipt of an “error” notification described the notification as having turned her life upside down. She faces the prospect of losing her job and her rented accommodation, since both depend on her ability to demonstrate lawful residence in the United Kingdom. “I can lose my job, I maybe don’t have the right even to rent the property that I’m living in now,” she said. The withdrawal of a status document does not merely alter a legal classification; it dismantles the practical architecture of a person’s daily existence.
The Home Office’s formal position is that those granted pre-settled status in error are “not withdrawal agreement beneficiaries,” though it allows that individuals may submit evidence to the contrary. It has also noted that a refusal following a further application to the EU Settlement Scheme would give rise to a right of appeal. What the department has not addressed is why a policy of this scope — touching nearly 1,500 people — was implemented without public announcement, nor why individuals whose status was correctly granted are being required to prove that fact at their own expense. Fabio estimates that resolving his situation through the courts could cost him more than £5,000.
The judicial review sought by the3million would, if granted, produce a binding determination applicable to all those in comparable circumstances, rather than forcing each affected individual through a separate and costly legal process. Whether the Home Office will contest that review or follow the precedent it has already quietly conceded in the administrative court remains to be seen. What is already clear is that a government policy presented as administrative correction has functioned, in practice, as the systematic erosion of rights that an international agreement was designed to guarantee.