A UK teacher has said she is “sick” about returning home to Spain after a three-year battle to get a post-Brexit residence permit, after her application for a residence permit was rejected because she missed a month of health cover in the first year after the UK left the EU.
Mark Saxby, 56, says he is “stuck” in a nightmarish limbo because he cannot convince anyone that he has the right to live in Spain, despite the EU-UK withdrawal agreement granting residence rights to those already in the country before Brexit.
He moved to Valencia and bought a property in early 2020, just before the pandemic began and months before the Brexit deadline for residence permits came on December 31 of the same year.
But now he fears he could be deported or denied entry to the country.
The closure of city halls and immigration offices during the pandemic meant her application was submitted just a few weeks before the deadline. When Valencian authorities finally informed her she was missing a month of health insurance cover, she says it was too late for her to do anything about it.
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“I just think I’ve done everything I can. It’s such a trivial thing. I lived in Germany for eight years before and I speak Italian, but I’ve always liked the Spanish people. They’re calm, friendly, smiling and not nervous, so when I thought about where I could get by on my teacher’s salary, I thought of Spain,” he said.
Saxby, who teaches English as a foreign language, says he is confused by all the avenues he has tried to find a solution and feels there is no one to help the British people, who he believes have been let down by Boris Johnson’s government in the Brexit negotiations.
“We were promised a deal ready to go into the oven but it seems to be people like me who are being roasted,” he said. He is returning to Spain in the next few days after a trip to lecture in Manchester and says he is feeling unwell with tension over whether he will be able to attend.
“After three years of being undocumented and living off my savings, I left Spain this summer to work in the UK (with accommodation provided). I spent the whole summer not knowing if I would be able to get through Spanish immigration next week and as the day approached I started feeling physically ill.
“My only home is in Spain. We were promised our rights would be protected by an ‘oven-ready deal’ but when I contact the UK embassy in Madrid they always say it’s nothing to do with them.
“On the other hand, the European Commission scattered me around its various agencies with tea and sympathy but no real help. It was really a bureaucratic nightmare.”
Saxby moved to Spain from Lancaster and registered with the council estate on arrival in 2020. When the lockdown was eased later that year, he applied for a non-earning economic visa, which he believed he was eligible for as he was unable to work during Covid.
Initially, he also faced difficulties in translating bank statements into English, a common difficulty experienced by foreigners.
But she says she was shocked to learn she had been refused because she had not received “the right type of private healthcare” between April and May 2021 – the UK’s first full year outside the EU. An EHIC tourist health card protected her for the first three months, but her private insurance only kicked in in May.
The self-sufficient individual appealed to the Valencian authorities, citing the bilateral health agreement between Spain and the United Kingdom, saying he believed that this agreement would protect him until June 2021.
He also contacted the Spanish ombudsman and the European ombudsman, who he said also referred him back to Madrid, “leading to further confusion and lack of resolution.”
He went straight to the commission, feeling as if he were hitting his head against the wall.
Their hopes were revived after a positive response from the “Solvit” unit of the commission, which was established in March 2023 to help resolve disputes with public authorities in EU member states.
“We consider these to be indicative of a general problem in the implementation and/or enforcement of Spain’s CSI requirement,” the report said, noting that the Commission had received numerous complaints about the implementation of Spain’s comprehensive sickness insurance (CSI) requirement, and citing a pre-Brexit directive requiring CSI as part of the 2004 Citizens’ Rights Directive under free movement rules.
But his hopes were dashed months later when the commission told him it could not look into an individual case and therefore there was “no ongoing dialogue” about his situation.
It was also said that since Solvit had not accepted his case, there was no ongoing case and the UK was no longer part of Solvit. Instead, he would have to “consult [his] “legal advisor”.
Saxby argues that, like other British citizens in the EU, they have no representation at national or EU level to advocate their case and have been “forgotten” by the British government in the withdrawal agreement.
EU citizens in the UK can appeal to the Independent Monitoring Authority or charities such as Settled or campaigners at the3million. But they are also backed at Europe’s highest level by the commission, which has threatened to take the UK government to the European Court of Justice over the implementation of the withdrawal agreement.
“The Commission considers that there are a number of shortcomings in the United Kingdom’s implementation of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and that these shortcomings continue to affect EU citizens covered by the withdrawal agreement,” the Commission said.
Officials in Madrid and Valencia did not respond to requests for comment.
The European Commission was contacted for an opinion.