Brits seeking to return to the UK with their EU spouses do not jump | Britain’s exit from the European Union

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British government officials have indicated that there will be no long queues for Britons who want to return to the UK with their EU spouses after Brexit.

Despite government pledges that their rights will remain the same after the UK leaves the bloc, officials have written to pro-Brexit Conservative MP Esther McVeigh to say they cannot prioritize paperwork applications for British citizens affected by Brexit.

The official said in an email to McVey after she intervened on behalf of one of her constituents who had been waiting since March for a family permit to allow his French wife and their children to return to the UK as a family unit.

On 1 September, he received a refusal from the Ministry of the Interior on the grounds that his papers were incomplete.

The rejection came as a shock to Ben Bramish, 46, and his wife Valerie, who had made elaborate plans to return home to the UK with new jobs, a home and school for their two children, at the age of four and six, including the sale of the family home.

Confident in his rights to go home, Ben, a middle manager in the auto industry, returned to Wilmslow in August while his wife went to France for a vacation with the kids to see her parents before the big move across the canal. But after the letter of the Ministry of the Interior, he returned to Brussels.

“We live in an Airbnb, and we have to move back to another Airbnb for three more days because someone else has booked this, and then we move in again. We have minimal belongings and no toys for the kids at all. A friend came home a few days ago and brought us Some things for the kids.

His Nightmare is one of countless narrations by Britons trying to move home to be near elderly parents, to take on new jobs or to have children in school.

Under post-Brexit rules, Britons married to EU citizens must obtain a family pass for their spouses to enter the UK as a family unit, but dozens of families who contacted the Guardian reported harrowing experiences.

The most frustrating thing about the experience, Ben said, was being left in the dark, with outright refusals rather than phone calls asking for supplemental documents. He has provided birth certificates, marriage certificates and government-issued certificates showing who has lived in his Brussels home since 2014 and a full permanent residency history for the past 20 years.

“There has to be a service level agreement on delivery times. When you do an international movement, you need certainty. Everything they asked for I could have provided within 24 hours – which annoys me very much.”

The official email said there are “no service standards for this type of application” and 15-day and 60-day shift pledges made for other visa applications do not apply. The official added that they had applied for “other entry clearance methods but they do not apply to the EU Settlement System family permits”.

Faced with the choice of staying near his mother in Wilmslow or his wife, he chose to return to Brussels to be with his family. His mother was so perplexed that she wrote to Boris Johnson about it.

Jane Golding, co-founder of Britain in Europe, an alliance of groups for UK citizens in the European Union, has called on the government to extend the March 29 deadline for spouses of British citizens who want to return to the UK. The problem, she said, was that “we were promised a three-year grace period, but what we got instead was a 15-month period.”

“Now the clock is ticking. There is just a little over six months left from that window and the backlog of Covid is taking that time more. The Home Office needs to devote more resources to this and better communicate what people need to do .

“Of course, the fair thing to do would be to extend – and give people three years from the date the rules actually changed, January 1, 2021, and for the government to fulfill its promises to its citizens in the European Economic Area and Switzerland.”

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