A central part of the “hostile environment” introduced by Teresa May when the British Home Secretary was the outsourcing of border processes to landlords, employers, teachers, and even healthcare workers, who were required to check on someone’s immigration status before providing them with services.
This opens the door to discrimination, as landlords and employers wish to avoid any possible bother down the road and so implicitly discriminate against people who look or sound foreign.
Facing discrimination
These fears were underlined by a recent pilot study from the University of York, which examined the impact of the UK’s move to a digital-only proof of one’s immigration status. Indeed, the researchers believe that the move to the digital system might breach the Withdrawal Agreement due to the discrimination it foists upon EU citizens.
“The EU settlement scheme is heavily digitalized and it immediately occurred to us that this meant it was more likely to discriminate against different types of EU citizens such as the elderly and disabled,” the authors explain. “After hearing anecdotal evidence of EU citizens experiencing difficulties renting in an extremely competitive housing market, we felt a duty to investigate.”
EU citizens who had been living in the UK prior to official departure from the EU had to apply for either settled or pre-settled status, which if granted was only provable digitally. No physical documentation was provided to show that people had the right to live and work in the UK.
No room here
The researchers examined the practices of a few hundred landlords to explore whether the burden to provide digital proof of one’s status resulted in tenants missing out on properties. That did indeed appear to be the case, with landlords likely to use one’s ID status to influence their decision more so than gender, ethnicity, age, or profession.
For instance, someone with a non-British-sounding name who worked in construction had an 87% chance of being successful with their application if they had a British passport. This fell to 13% with digital-only status.
“Landlords showed a clear preference for traditional, paper-based forms of ID,” the authors conclude. “Prospective tenants having a non-British sounding name, did not influence landlord’s decisions when they had a British passport, but with a share code those tenants were suddenly at a real disadvantage. This suggests there is something about digital documents which can compound disadvantages in the housing market.”
