by A British teacher has revealed he is “sick” and anxious about returning to his home in Spain amid a three-year battle to gain post-Brexit residency after being turned down because he lacked medical insurance on him in the first year after the day. The UK left the EU.
Mark Saxby, 56, says he feels “trapped” in a nightmarish limbo as he cannot convince anyone he has the right to live in Spain despite the EU-UK withdrawal agreement guaranteeing residency rights for those in the country before Brexit.
He moved to Valencia and bought a property in early 2020 just before the pandemic and months before the Brexit deadline for residence on December 31 of that year.
But now he fears he could be fired or barred from entering the country.
Due to the closure of town halls and immigration offices during the pandemic, his application was only submitted a few weeks before the deadline. He says that when the Valencian authorities finally got back to him informing him that he was missing a month’s health insurance cover, it was too late for him to do anything about it.
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“I think I have done everything necessary. It is so small. I lived in Germany for eight years before and I speak Italian, but I always liked Spanish people. They are calm, friendly, they laugh and they are not upset, so when I was thinking about how I would have the means to live on my teachers’ income I thought of Spain,” he said.
Saxby, who teaches English as a foreign language, says his head is “spinning” with all the ways he has tried to solve it and he feels there is no one to help the British people he believes the government Boris Johnson abandoned in Brexit negotiations.
“We were promised a market that was ready for the oven but it seems people like me were roasted,” he said. He is returning to Spain in the next few days after a trip home to teach in Manchester and says he feels ill and worries about whether he will be able to join.
“After three years of undocumented status and living on my savings, I left Spain to work in the UK this summer (with accommodation provided). I’ve spent the whole summer not knowing if I’ll get through Spanish immigration next week and, as the day approaches, I’m feeling physically ill.
“My only home is in Spain. We were promised that our rights would be protected in an ‘oven ready deal’, but when I have contacted the UK Embassy in Madrid they always say they have nothing to do with them.
“On the other hand, the European Commission has just taken me around its various agencies, with tea and sympathy but no real help. It really was a bureaucratic nightmare.”
Saxby moved to Spain from Lancaster and registered with the town hall when he arrived in 2020. When the lockdown was eased later that year, he applied for a non-profit economic visa, which he thought was appropriate because he was able to work during it. Covid.
At first, he faced common difficulties before foreigners, including translating bank statements into English.
But he says he was surprised to learn he was rejected because he did not have the “right kind of private healthcare” in place between April and May 2021, the UK’s first full year outside the EU. The EHIC tourist health card covered him for the first three months but it wasn’t until May when his private insurance kicked in.
Self-sufficient, he appealed to the Valencian authorities, citing a bilateral health care agreement between Spain and the UK, which he believed would have covered him up to June 2021.
He also contacted the Spanish ombudsman and the European ombudsman, who ordered him back to Madrid “as a result of further confusion and no resolution”, he says.
Feeling like he was banging his head against a brick wall, he then went straight to the Commission.
In March 2023, his hopes were raised after a positive response from the Commission’s “Solvit” unit, established to help resolve disputes with public authorities in EU member states.
He said the Commission had received a number of complaints about Spain’s implementation of the comprehensive sickness insurance (CSI) requirement “which we consider may be indicative of a general problem with implementation and/or in the implementation of the CSI requirement by Spain”, he said, citing its pre-Brexit Directive on CSI required as part of the 2004 Citizens’ Rights Directive under free movement rules.
But months later his hopes were dashed when the Commission told him that it could not look at an individual case and therefore “there is no ongoing dialogue” on his difficulty.
They also told him that because Solvit had not accepted his case, there was no ongoing case and the UK was no longer part of Solvit anyway. Instead, he would have to “consult [his] legal adviser”.
Saxby, like other British citizens in the EU, claims that they have no representation to argue their case nationally or at EU level and that the British government has forgotten them in the withdrawal agreement.
EU citizens in the UK can go to the Independent Monitoring Authority or charities such as Settled or campaigners at an3million. But they also have support at the highest level in Europe from the Commission, which is threatening to take the UK government to the European court of justice over the implementation of the withdrawal agreement.
“The Commission considers that there were a number of shortcomings in the United Kingdom’s implementation of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which continue to affect EU citizens under the withdrawal agreement,” he wrote.
Authorities in Madrid and Valencia did not respond to requests for comment.
The European Commission has been contacted for comment.
