In less than a month, any European citizen that has not applied to the Settled Status scheme will lose their legal right to be in the UK, the place they call home. 

Today, dozens of charities tasked with helping people to apply have written to the government today to warn of what we’ve been saying for years: that the scheme is inadequate, the deadline arbitrary, and that (at best) many, many thousands of people are about to fall through the cracks.

Every bit of pressure we can bring to bear in these final days could make a difference. So please, take just one minute to use this one-click tool to email your MP and ask them to pressure the government to drop the deadline. 

Email your MP in less than a minute right now

Please also take a moment to share the tool on social media – everyone you can reach counts. 

When we say “the next Windrush”, we don’t use that term lightly – and we know not all of the dynamics and structural racism will be the same in every case. But we are talking about a process that we know will leave a (very) large number of people as “illegal immigrants” in their own home.

It’s as if the British state hasn’t learned anything – or as if it doesn’t care. 

How many people might be affected? Well, we don’t even know how many EU citizens live in the UK. We know that 5.4 million applications have been received – which is almost double the number of Europeans we thought were living here. If there was a failure rate of just 1%, that would mean 54,000 people becoming illegal – but the far bigger factors are likely to be those who haven’t managed to apply; those who are given “pre-settled status” and rejected later; and the large number of errors which the government will have made.