On Sunday I visited Great Yarmouth at the invitation of the local immigration advice agency - Atena Porady (actually based in Lowestoft). She serves EU citizens, mostly Poles, but also Lithuanians, Portuguese, etc. She has close links with a solicitor's office and is able to access legal services to her clients at a reasonable rate. She is horrified by a number of Polish advice agencies which consistently give harmful advice.
She gave me ludicrous examples of how the Home Office has behaved in the last year with applicants for PR.
One example - a Polish lady married for several years to a Pakistani. When she applied for PR it was refused because the Home Office accused her of a sham marriage, which it is not.
A second example - a Polish lady employed for 11 years in an estate agent but before referendum never bothered to apply for PR as she thought it unnecessary. She lodged the usual documents along with her passport. Several weeks later the passport was returned as the Home Office took a copy of the document. A month later her application was rejected because there was no passport on the file.
Another Polish lady applied in the usual way and her application was rejected because there were no photographs, but the photographs in an envelope attached to the application form were returned with her other documents and the refusal form. She reapplied using the same questionnaire but the Home Office refused again because page 6 was apparently missing from the application. The agency adviser thinks the Home Office removed that page earlier so its absence when resent to the Home Office was not noticed.
Another of her clients was notified that her application was going to be refused because her birth certificate was missing. The Agency worker who supervised the completion of the questionnaire rang the Home Office official asking her to look again because the certificate was definitely sent, and a minute or so later the official confirmed she had "found" the certificate as it had fallen on the floor. When their application was returned it transpired that her son's name was misspelt. When the agency worker lodged a complaint she was told the correction could not be rectified but a new application could be made for him with the corrected spelling.
The agency worker told me it is now impossible to follow up complaints as there are either no responses, or worse the email addresses supplied are changed and other addresses claim they know nothing about the case and it then becomes out of date.
She described the treatment by the Home Office as a kind of mendacious negligence by Home Office staff. Refusals are prompt and since the referendum PR acceptances are very rare.
Even worse is the behaviour of local officials in East Anglia. Job Centre staff and police officers whom she has pursued in her casework have been under the impression that all Poles will be leaving after Brexit and are acting as if they were surprised that Polish families are still here after the referendum. When a Polish family, whom I met there, had complained about harassment by an aggressive neighbour haranguing their children with shouts of "go back to Poland", a policeman arrived, visited the neighbour and had a cup of tea with her and then came back to the Polish family and said there was no case of harassment to answer and "if you don't like it you can always go back home." When children from that same family were being told by fellow pupils that they should go back to Poland, the teacher refused to act saying the children were only repeating the views of their parents. She refused to remonstrate with the children repeating these taunts.
When the agency worker herself, who is Polish, applied for an advertised managerial position she was told that this post was only for British citizens and not for foreigners.
A Polish born student whom I met had been refused a student loan because of her nationality.
This is not London, It is an area that is economically depressed, voted overwhelmingly for Brexit and has no concept of discrimination or of EU laws, which they feel does not apply to them. This deterioration in attitudes to EU citizens followed the referendum results and as far as local residents are concerned the UK has already left the EU.
Incidentally the agency worker Dorota Darnell is a real firebrand, fighting for her clients like a lioness. She is a great admirer of the3million and would be happy to assist us in any way she can, especially on any public events.
It would be useful to raise these examples when we meet DExEU and Euro MPs.
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