The lack of clarity in how to prove residency in the UK citizenship application
To prove I met the citizenship residency requirement, I had to try and make sense of vague guidance hidden away in PDFs.
Proving residency for 5 years
As with my last post, when I speak about the citizenship process, I’ll be referring to how I applied, which is as someone who had indefinite leave to remain for at least a year.
Under that category, I had to prove I met the residency conditions for the 5 years prior to applying. The residency conditions set out how much time you can have spent outside the UK to be able to apply.
The GOV.UK site states this regarding eligibility:
You should not have:
-spent more than 450 days outside the UK during the 5 years before your application
-spent more than 90 days outside the UK in the last 12 months
-broken any UK immigration laws (for example living illegally in the UK)
Okay, but how do you prove that?
Forcing applicants off to a PDF to find the documents they need
When you get to the next page on how to apply, the only direction you get on what evidence you need is this:
Read the guidance to check if you can apply and what documents you need to provide.
And where does that link go? To a 40-page PDF document you have to trawl through to find what evidence you need.
(Side note: An accessible webpage version of the PDF was added right after I completed the application. But the accessible version is the same 40 pages of guidance marked up with HTML. So one massive webpage to scroll through.)
There are two headings in the table of contents relevant to this topic:
- Absences from the UK
- Residence Requirements
The latter is the one which actually has the info you need. The section says you can prove your residency with the following:
-Your passports
-If you are unable to provide your passport, explain why and supply letters from employers (including start and finish dates), payslips, P60s, educational establishments or other government departments indicating your presence in the United Kingdom during the relevant period
If you read this list and don’t read anything else, it makes it sound like providing your passport is enough.
For some nationals, though, it’s not. But you’d need to read a few paragraphs below to find that out.
If your passport is not stamped when you come into the United Kingdom, you must still provide your passport, but also provide alternative evidence of presence as above.
As an American, I’ve been able to use the e-gates that British citizens use to return to the country ever since they were rolled out to a few other nationalities in 2019. Using the e-gates, though, means my passport is not stamped.
Because of this, I needed to provide extra documentation with my application. Of course, if I just read that original bulleted list, I might have thought I just needed my passport.
It’s only because I know a lot about immigration processes to begin with that I knew my passport not getting stamped anymore would be an issue.
Getting sent to yet another PDF (and still not saying what documents are needed)
If you were a careful reader, you would have worked out you needed additional evidence. But what do you actually need to send?
What the second bullet point lists begs lots of questions:
- ‘letters from employers (including start and finish dates)’: What else does the letter need to include besides start and finish dates?
- ‘payslips, P60s’: How many are needed?
- ‘educational establishments or other government departments’: Which departments? How do I know if this point is relevant to me?
Below the bulleted list, it says this:
Examples of documents that can be used to show you have been in the UK for the required time period, can be found here.
What is ‘here’? Page 16 of yet another PDF with a section titled ‘Absences’.
(Side note: Again, an accessible version of this PDF was added after I applied. But the ‘here’ link does not take you to the page 16 equivalent part of the guidance anymore. You’re taken to page to decide if you want to read the PDF or HTML version of this new guidance.)
In a process where so far, every piece of content has referred to ‘you’ as the applicant, the first sentence of this section was a stark contrast:
You must check the available evidence to see whether an applicant meets the residence requirements.
Scrolling up to the about section of the PDF, it’s confirmed I am not in fact the target audience of this guidance that applicants are directed to. Rather:
This guidance tells Home Office staff how to consider applications for naturalisation as a British citizen.
Why are we directed to staff guidance? Why can’t we just be told what we need?!
Scrolling back down the absence section, the content doesn’t provide any real answers.
It says the following can be used as evidence:
-passports or travel documents which have been stamped to show arrival in the UK and entry and departure from other countries: these should be checked against the list of absences that applicants are asked to provide on the application form
-Home Office records
-if the applicant does not have passports to cover the qualifying period, other evidence such as employers’ letters or tax and National Insurance letters:
— in such cases you should assess whether there is sufficient evidence to show that that applicant has been resident in the UK during the qualifying period, giving them the benefit of any doubt where claimed absences are within the limits we would normally allow and there are no grounds to doubt the accuracy of the claim
First of all, these bulleted lists don’t mention anything about the lack of passport stamps — the third bullet makes it seem like it’s only relevant if you don’t have a passport to cover all the qualifying period.
Second, the third bullet provides even less information than the previous PDF about the specifications for the evidence you need.
All this reading through PDFs, and I was no closer to getting the answers I needed.
Searching forums for help
Clearly, the Home Office wasn’t going to give me the information I needed. At this point, I searched online to see if there were any forum posts where previous applicants were asking similar questions.
Sure enough, I did find posts from applicants who were also confused by this. After seeing what previous people had submitted (and follow-up replies confirming their citizenship had been granted), I got enough info to feel more confident in what my employer letter had to say and how many payslips I should provide.
I have to acknowledge, though, a lot of that confidence comes from being a privileged immigrant with an American passport.
I can read what others have done online and feel confident that I stand a good chance if I submit similar documentation. Other applicants might only feel more confident after paying a lawyer to confirm this information.
One final piece of vague guidance right before you apply
I mentioned previously how in that first PDF, I could have easily missed the paragraph which mentioned I needed alternative evidence because my passport doesn’t always get stamped.
Turns out, if I did miss that, I would have eventually been told this right at the very end of the online application form, before paying and submitting.
The form gives you a list at the end of the documents you need to apply. It said I would need proof of living in the UK the last 5 years, specifying:
If you are a Non-EEA National, you need to include your passport to prove you have lived in the UK for the relevant 3- or 5-year period.
If you do not have your passport or it was not stamped when you entered the UK, you need to include letters (for example, from your employer or government department) as proof.
Bank statements or household bills are not suitable proof you have been living in the UK.
So the second sentence makes it clear I need other evidence, but the info in parentheses doesn’t tell me any more than either of the PDFs said. It only adds that banks statements and bills don’t count.
Till the very end, this process does not provide clear information about what documents you need.
Be specific
The vagueness in the residency guidance is only creating confusion for applicants in their citizenship journey.
The Home Office needs to be specific about how many documents you need to provide and what counts as ‘good enough’.
If what’s acceptable varies, they should provide some example scenarios of evidence that’s acceptable in an application and examples of what would not be accepted and why.
Like I said in my last post, I know it would be on-brand of me to say the Home Office won’t provide this type of guidance because they like hurting immigrants. But in other cases, they do in fact give examples.
See the financial requirements guidance for family visas where they give case studies to show how someone would or would not meet this requirement. (Page 17 of Appendix FM 1.7 gives an example of this.)
So it’s not unheard of for them to provide this type of guidance. They just need to do it for the citizenship residency requirement, too.
Most importantly, though, they need to get all this info out of long, scrolling masses of content and structured in a way that lets applicants easily find the information relevant to them.
My UK citizenship experience blog posts
This is my third post in a series about my experience applying for UK citizenship.
Read the other posts in this series:
- I applied for British citizenship out of fear
- The disconnect between services in the UK citizenship process
All text from the Government referenced in this post was as it was written at the time I was interacting with this content in November 2022.
My next post is coming out in June.
