Hi everyone,
Thank you for sharing your experience and info, this is very helpful.
I am a French national and my civil partner (PACS) is a Peruvian national. She applied to the EU settlement scheme back in October 2019 as my non-EEA Family member. In January we received the COA and a week later we got contacted by an agent who stated the following: “please provide evidence of your relationship to your EU family member as follows: Marriage Certificate or Civil Partnership. The evidence that you have provided so far is not acceptable because you provided Civil Solidarity Pact as evidence of relationship, this is recognised in law but is currently not sufficient in lieu of marriage/civil partnership”. Because we had wrongly submitted only the Recipisse and not the actual PACS contract (convention) when she applied in October, we thought this was the issue and decided to submit the Convention and further evidence of our relationship. As you can see, the message from the agent is hard to interpret, especially when you consider the “not sufficient” language used. By today we have not heard back from the EU settlement scheme.
Having read that your received a refusal based on durable partners we think that once the EU settlement scheme concludes that the PACS is not a valid (or sufficient) document, they move on to consider your application on the basis of a durable partnership. This in turn requires complying with the following: having lived together in a relationship akin to marriage or civil partnership for two years or more, unless there is other significant evidence of the durable relationship for example evidence of joint responsibility for a child, evidence of cohabitation, bank statements, utility bills at the same address, having a mortgage together, and evidence of joint finances, etc. (
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... gov-uk.pdf)
You can also arrive to the conclusion that your application will get considered as a durable partnership because of what is written in the following document (
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... 9.0ext.pdf) , bottom of page 10: “Proof of Civil Partnership – Civil partnership certificate: if a UK issued civil partnership certificate is missing, you can assess if the other evidence provided sufficiently evidenced the partnership.”
The above may be the reason why my partner has still not been refused by the EU settlement scheme, but again this is just an idea. When submitting further evidence of our relationship in January, we included a joint account under both our names, proof of having lived together for about 1.5 years, proof of shared bills, pictures, messages, holidays bookings, etc, that extended throughout our whole relationship that started in April 2017. From then to today we have even more evidence of our relationship that we are thinking to upload: we have moved together into our own new home, have many more bills under both our names, etc.
My partner currently has a full time job, that she is allowed to hold because prior to applying to the EU settlement scheme she was on a student visa that allowed her to work full time – this status got frozen when she applied to the EU settlement scheme, and allows her to work full time until they make a decision on her application.
We wanted to ask you if you had submitted similar evidence as the one mentioned above as proof of relationship, to assess whether we had a chance to get the application accepted on a durable partnership basis. We will put in contact with the EU settlement scheme and ask for advice too.
Joewat - did you hear back from the scheme administrative review?
Thank you very much,
