On the first of July 2026, we attended the 5th EU Citizens Gathering at the University of Birmingham organised by the3million and the European Union Delegation to the United Kingdom. The focus of this year’s conference was EU Citizens at Work.
Citizens Rights Project was kindly invited to co-facilitate a workshop to gather key insights from a variety of frontline practitioners and policy makers alike on the current state of EU Citizens Rights.
We specifically exchanged our lived experiences, both personal and professional, on the most pressing issues surrounding the EU Settlement Scheme status in order to propose tangible solutions to the conference plenary.
Our own Maria Helena Papachristos, alongside Ola Sobieraj from the3million, focused on barriers when proving/maintaining one’s EU Settlement Scheme status. The other two groups, co-facilitated by colleagues from Settled, Europia, Seraphus and the3million, exchanged ideas on complications when obtaining status and losing status.
The group’s invaluable and diverse expertise resulted in conversations grounded in lived barriers across all sectors of society. Coupled with the3million’s focus on creative thinking, we generated meaningful proposals for future policy adoption.
We focused on using limitless imagination rather than current constraints to explore a long-term vision for a more accessible, service-user-centred settlement system that operates both digitally and physically. These reimaginations aim to protect the rights of the EU Settlement Scheme’s ageing population to ensure effective measures for those being left behind.
The current inaccessibility, distrust, and confusion created by the scheme’s digitisation was reflected nationally; our local clients’ experiences of poverty information were mirrored on a much broader scale.
We also stressed that the onus providing accurate information should rest on authorities just as much as individual citizens, particularly airline carriers, to avoid undue stress. Gross exaggerations, increased policing, misinformation when traveling has already inhibited many citizens from exercising their right to free movement. A unified effort of information outreach and training is therefore critical.
There was also a clear consensus that bad data collection leads to bad decision-making. This is why the conference’s bridging of academics, advocates, caseworkers, activists, and policy figures was necessary to create clearer, reciprocal, and authorative channels of communication.
This reminder to gather and invest in social relationships across people, countries, and standings felt like an inherently European sentiment of transnational cross-collaboration.
As confirmed in our own work, the data collected during the discussions evidenced the EU Settlement Scheme is far from being finished.
If you, or someone else you know, needs support applying to the EU Settlement Scheme or managing your eVisa, contact our team at immigration@citizensrightsproject.org.
The conference itself was a call to action, highlighting the continuing and emerging secondary needs of the Scheme, and most critically the need for increased and renewed funding to protect the rights of EU citizens in post-Brexit Britain.
At Citizens Rights Project, we are very grateful for the continuous financial support of the Scottish Government which allows us to support EU Citizens and their families in this area. However, it is not enough to maintain our current level of support beyond the short-term. We are currently running our crowdfunder to ensure that no EU Citizens is left behind in Post-Brexit Britain.
If you identify with our cause please consider donating. Any donation makes a lived difference.
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