The UK government will begin revoking the post-Brexit residency rights of EU citizens it judges to have left the country, with ministers to use official travel data as a key tool for identifying and removing individuals from the settlement scheme.
The Policy: Targeted Removal of Pre-Settled Status
From 9 April 2026, the Home Office will start removing “pre-settled status” from individuals deemed to have broken the rules on continuous residence. This status, granted under the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS), was given to EU, EEA, and Swiss nationals who had lived in the UK for less than five years when they applied. It provides a temporary right to live, work, and study for up to five years, after which holders must apply for permanent “settled status”. The initiative, legally permissible under the 2020 Brexit withdrawal agreement, is aimed at preventing unlawful immigration and protecting public services, according to the government.
Officials will prioritise cases where individuals are believed to have spent the longest periods outside the UK, starting with those absent for up to five years. The Home Office stated that status will only be removed where it is proportionate and that affected individuals will be contacted and given an opportunity to provide evidence or explain their absences before any final decision, with a right of appeal. A spokesperson said the “vast majority” of the 1.4 million people who held pre-settled status at the end of 2025 were unaffected, and only those with “long absences” would be asked to prove ongoing eligibility.
Data Concerns: The Risks of Flawed Travel Records
The plan’s reliance on travel data to calculate absences has triggered significant alarm among rights monitors and advocacy groups, who point to a history of inaccuracies in government border records. The Home Office will use this data alongside tax and benefit records to determine if someone has breached the rule that pre-settled status holders must not be absent from the UK for more than 30 months in any five-year period.
Campaign group the3million has cited concrete examples of the data’s flaws. In one case, an individual applying to upgrade their status was questioned by the Home Office based on travel records containing “obvious inaccuracies”. These included two outbound journeys listed without any inbound journey between them, and journeys logged on the same date to different destinations. The group noted that travel data often contains bookings for journeys that were never taken, a common issue with low-cost airlines where cancellations are difficult.
These concerns are amplified by the recent “HMRC fiasco”, where inaccurate Home Office border data led to almost 20,000 parents being wrongly stripped of child benefits. Investigations by The Guardian and The Detail found that Home Office data has historically failed to reliably record return journeys and has included airline passenger manifests that did not account for “no-shows”. The National Audit Office is currently investigating HMRC’s use of this flawed data.
Miranda Biddle, chief executive of the Independent Monitoring Authority for the Citizens’ Rights Agreements (IMA), said her statutory body had “expressed concerns” to the Home Office about implementation. “It is difficult to know how caseworkers will make individual decisions in practice,” the IMA stated, adding it was engaging with officials to secure assurances about safeguards and robust decision-making. The IMA noted the “concern, stress and uncertainty” the situation may cause.
Broader doubts about Home Office data integrity persist. A March 2024 report indicated major flaws in an immigration database affecting over 76,000 people, and a February 2021 coding error led to over 15,000 records being deleted from the Police National Computer.
The Rules: Defining Continuous Residence
The core of the issue lies in the differing residency requirements for the two types of status under the EUSS. For the estimated 1.4 million individuals with pre-settled status, the key requirement is that they do not spend more than 30 months (or 2.5 years) outside the UK in any rolling five-year period. Absences can be of any individual length, but the total must stay under this threshold.
Once an individual accrues five years of continuous residence, they can apply for settled status, which confers indefinite leave to remain. Holders of settled status have stronger protections and can be absent from the UK for up to five consecutive years without losing their right to return and live in the country.
The Migration Observatory at Oxford University has highlighted that the 6.2 million applications to the EUSS likely overstate the number of EU citizens currently in the UK, as some who applied may have since left. Its analysis of census and other data suggests the true figure of those remaining may be between 3 million and 4 million. Net migration of EU citizens to the UK has been negative since 2022, with more leaving than arriving between mid-2021 and mid-2025.
The Home Office is also in the process of transitioning to a fully digital system, with most physical residency documents expiring at the end of 2024. Holders of pre-settled or settled status already access their digital immigration status, or “eVisa”, through a UKVI account. On 10 April 2026, the department published a policy paper outlining expanded automation within the EUSS, including increased use of automated checks for granting settled status, which has further stoked fears about decisions being made without sufficient human scrutiny.
