A 95-year-old Italian man who has been living in the UK for 68 years has been asked to prove he is a resident by the British Home Office so that he can remain after Brexit, despite receiving the state pension for the past 32 years.
Antonio Finelli moved to the UK in 1952 when he answered an appeal for immigrant workers as part of the reconstruction effort after the end of World War II.
He was welcomed with a week’s advance wages and a sandwich when he arrived at Folkestone, England, but almost 70 years later said that he has been forced to supply 80 pages of bank statements to prove his right to stay in the UK.
He was asked for proof that he had been in the UK for five consecutive years when he applied for the EU settlement scheme, but the British Home Office app said that it could not find any record of him.
“It is wrong,” he said as he waited for volunteers’ help at an advice center in Islington, London.
His wife and only son have died, and he is also worried about his grandchildren.
“Will they be OK?” he asked a volunteer.
“It was a surprise because I have had the aliens’ certificate,” he said, referring to the document given to immigrants who moved to the UK between 1918 and 1957.
“I’ve been receiving the pension and working all my life, so I don’t understand why I have to provide these bank statements,” he said.
The case highlights concerns about stress and anxiety being caused to the vulnerable.
Dimitri Scarlato, a volunteer at Inca CGIL, an advice center for Italians, said that he has seen one woman at the center who was so stressed about about having to find paperwork she “thought she was going to have a heart attack.”
“What I find unacceptable is that Mr Finelli has been living here for 70 years. He has been here all his life. He worked for 40 years and [after] 32 years received his pension. He is a good fellow, a good citizen and came before freedom of movement, [but] still has the burden of providing proof of residence,” said Scarlato said. “He has been here all these years, but the system treats him as if he doesn’t exist. Why?”
Finelli is the second case in a week of elderly EU citizens struggling with the settled status application that all EU citizens need to complete to stay in the UK after June next year.
Last week, it emerged that a 101-year-old, Giovanni Palmiero, who coincidentally knew Finelli as a child in Italy, had been told to get his parents to apply on his behalf because the British Home Office system believed he was a one-year-old.
Scarlato fears that the problem might be much bigger and affects tens of thousands if British Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) records are not all digitized.
“We think this is because the DWP records are not digitized. We have tried to raise this with the Home Office because we are seeing many elderly people come in whose records cannot be found,” Scarlato said.
He said that he has seen more than 100 applications where records cannot be found.
“I’ve processed around 500 applications and half of them are for elderly people. Half these people have not been found by the system and it asks them to prove their residency, even though the DWP has been sending out pensions and [they] have been here since the 1950s and 1960s. Imagine an elderly person who doesn’t have his name on any bill and has no proof of residence, and they have been here all these years and they get to their 80s and 90s and are asked to prove they have been here for five years,” Scarlato said. “What if you are living alone and vulnerable, or in the middle of nowhere and don’t know where to go?”
The Guardian asked if there is a digitization problem with pension records, but the office declined to answer the specific question.
“Automated checks mean that the vast majority of applicants don’t have to provide additional evidence, but when it’s needed there is a vast range of evidence people can submit, including doctor’s notes, payslips and letters from charities,” the office said.
“The system checks ... records to see if it can confirm how long someone has been in the UK” and in testing 75 percent of applications did not need to provide evidence of residence, it said.
It did not specify if the 25 percent of applicants were working age with contemporary records or pensioners who could only rely on old DWP records.
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