The UK Home Office has told 1,473 people that it granted them pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) in error. A written parliamentary answer published on 24 September gave the figure, which runs from the EUSS launch in 2018 to 30 June 2026 and may change.
Among those notified are people born with Italian nationality whose citizenship Italy recognized only later. One of their cases has already ended in a Home Office concession, and an Italian lawyer argues the department misread when Italian citizenship begins.
Home Office minister Lord Hanson of Flint disclosed the number in reply to Liberal Democrat peer Lord German. His department holds no reportable data on how many of those statuses have expired or face expiry.
Holders of settled status, the permanent tier, can receive the same notice. No count for them appears in the minister’s answer, which covers pre-settled status only.
Expiry, not cancellation
A “granted in error” notice cancels nothing. Pre-settled status stays valid until its expiry date, but the Home Office will not extend it, and the holder loses the right to sponsor family members under the EUSS.
Since September 2023, the department has routinely extended pre-settled status ahead of expiry, so the notice removes a renewal holders otherwise receive without applying. Settled status holders who get a notice keep their status but lose the right to bring family to the UK.
Until expiry, a pre-settled holder keeps the right to work and can apply for any other visa route open to him, according to the minister’s answer. Once the status lapses without a new grant, the3million warns, the person is in the UK unlawfully.
An NHS worker who received a notice fears losing her job and possibly the right to rent her home, according to the Guardian. Another of the newspaper’s cases, an Italian engineer in London since 2018, keeps his settled status but stands to lose the right to have his wife live with him.
The Home Office runs these checks, the IMA understands, when a pre-settled holder applies to upgrade, or when a relative applies to join a settled sponsor. Nobody can appeal the notice itself.
Affected holders can file a fresh EUSS application before the status lapses, which the Home Office treats as in time, and can appeal any refusal. According to the Guardian, the department considers those it granted pre-settled status in error “not withdrawal agreement beneficiaries” unless they can show otherwise.
Legal challenge
Campaign group the3million, aware of at least 50 cases according to the Guardian, sent the Home Office a pre-action letter on 28 August. That letter is the formal step before a judicial review. Wilson Solicitors and barristers from Garden Court Chambers act for the group.
Two extensions later, the department now has until 2 October to respond. Removing rights someone already holds amounts to “a decision in substance,” the group argues, and should carry a proportionality assessment and a right of appeal.
Many of the errors, in the3million’s account, never happened. “In many cases the Home Office is actually wrong to say there was a mistake,” reads its crowdfunding appeal.
The Independent Monitoring Authority (IMA), the statutory watchdog for post-Brexit citizens’ rights, has told the Home Office that the policy may breach Articles 13(4) and 21 of the Withdrawal Agreement. Caseworker guidance on the practice dates from 11 November 2025, though the Home Office told the IMA the policy itself has run since 2023.
Italian descent
Brazilians and others who hold Italian nationality by birth sit among the affected. Home Office caseworkers dated their Italian citizenship from the day Italy documented it, which sometimes fell after the 31 December 2020 eligibility cutoff.
In one judicial review, the department backed down. It withdrew its “granted in error” finding against the claimant, according to the Guardian. The department also accepted that receiving a physical Italian passport after Brexit did not mark the start of her Italian citizenship.
Marco Mesina, an Italian tax attorney and founder of Move to Dolce Vita, calls the UK position “quite paradoxical.” Under Italian law, he explains, a child born to an Italian parent is Italian from birth. “Recognition iure sanguinis does not create citizenship; it simply certifies a status that has existed all along.”
Because the Withdrawal Agreement defines a Union citizen as a national of a member state, Mesina argues, the UK must take Italian nationality as Italian law defines it. London “cannot introduce its own rules on when that nationality began, or its own methods of ascertaining it.”
In his reading, a passport or recognition decree is “evidence of citizenship, not its source.” Dating someone’s Italian status from the decree “turns a piece of evidence into the origin of the status, and that is simply not how Italian law works.”
Proof and status
The practical side, Mesina concedes, “is where things get genuinely complicated.” Until Italy completes the recognition procedure, a descendant’s citizenship “isn’t recorded in any Italian register, and the person has no document to show for it.”
He frames the problem as a question: “How does someone prove to another jurisdiction that they were Italian at a time when not even the Italian State had formally acknowledged it?” Britain may, he allows, “legitimately ask for proof at the time of the application.”
Once recognition exists, however, “it speaks for the whole period since birth, and it must be given that effect.” Mesina compresses the point further: “Proof may come later; the status does not.”
Lawyers acting for the3million advise Italians who hold a notice to consider a fresh settled status application backed by an expert report on Italian law. Writing in the legal blog Free Movement, they note that the claimant in the conceded case had obtained such reports from Italian-qualified lawyers.
Return on ancestry
Jeremy Savory, founder and CEO of Savory & Partners, has watched the fallout from Brexit up close: “With every passing year, the catastrophe that was Brexit keeps on giving.” Many of his former colleagues, all European citizens, are among the families he describes as “in limbo.”
Brexit also disrupted British friends of his “who are now seeking European residency options.” Savory himself holds both British and European citizenship, the latter obtained through descent 15 years ago.
People asked at the time why he would “spend all that money and endure the headache of paperwork.” Then Brexit happened, “and everyone asked me how I did it.”
He now tells Western clients, “those from North America or Europe,” to trace their ancestry first, “before spending anything on citizenship by investment.” Citizenship by descent, in his view, “offers the best possible return on investment.”
Savory expects demand to grow. “We live in a world where traditional alliances have been tested and broken, which is why the optionality of holding citizenships from different regional blocs will become ever more appealing to the masses.”
Italy’s cutoff
That route has narrowed in Italy. Law 74/2025 deems anyone born abroad who holds another citizenship never to have acquired Italian nationality. Exceptions cover those who applied for recognition by 27 March 2025, plus two narrow cases tied to a parent or grandparent.
Italy’s Constitutional Court upheld the reform in March. In July it referred the reform’s compatibility with EU law to the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Mesina notes that the people in the UK cases obtained recognition “well before” the March 2025 cutoff, “so the reform doesn’t affect them.” The reform still shows, in his view, “how much weight the timing of recognition now carries, in Italy as well as abroad.”
