What a difference a few weeks can make in someone's life!  

In a short space of time I was asked to be a witness at the House of Commons UK Exiting the EU committee, I agreed, and then last Wednesday I went to London to give evidence to the UK MP committee to explain some of the problems that we all face post-BREXIT, if a well thought out exit is not agreed with the European Union. 

As promised in my last E-zine, this one is intended to be an overview of the proceedings and some of the things I have learnt and things that I will be doing moving forward.  

Before I go into more detail, for those of you who may not have seen the hearing, CLICK HERE. (It is 3 hours long and the first half is dedicated to the EU citizens living in the UK. I, and my fellow witnesses gave our evidence in the second half).

You may also like to see a Guardian article on the hearing HERE

This E-zine is not intended to be a detailed summary of events but merely an overview and observations from myself and the other people who have been involved in the preparation.

THE CAMPAIGNERS

Since being asked to be a witness at this hearing I have been working alongside a number of EU based lawyers and legal professionals.  In the hearing you may see a lady and a gentleman sat behind me. These are Jane Golding a Berlin based lawyer who has been instrumental in organising the evidence for the hearing and Jeremy Morgan QC, who is now retired but actively involved in the campaign to secure rights for UK citizens living in the EU. 

It has become inherently clear to me that this is an incredibly complex process. There are so many factors to consider both for EU citizens living in the UK and UK citizens living in the EU. (I shall focus on the latter...us!). 

The complexities are too varied to go into in this E-zine but the main problems can be broken down into two groups. Those faced by retirees and those faced by the UK citizens who are working in other EU states.   

Before I start, I would say that the most worrying thing about these negotiations that struck me in London was the total lack of understanding from the MP's as to the potential problems that we could all face. Whilst I felt that some were genuinely sympathetic, the present lack of understanding of the situation was really quite disturbing. 

THE HEARING

In the hearing, we felt, that a lot of focus seemed to be placed on the potential loss of rights to healthcare and indexation of UK state pensions for UK citizens who are retired in Europe. In some ways this makes sense since the stereotypical image of people retiring to Spain is what is often portrayed in the press. 

At the start of our evidence we were asked what we felt about Theresa May's reciprocal approach to ensuring the rights of EU citizens in the UK on the basis that the EU recognised our own rights.  

We as a group felt strongly that there should be an immediate and unilateral announcement by the UK government to protect the rights of EU citizens currently residing in the UK. This would, in itself, be a 'magnanimous' gesture to the EU and would hopefully provide the EU with the same incentive to treat us in the same way. We equally thought that the UK government should immediately agree to the continued indexation of UK state pensions to provide the financial security to hundreds of thousands of retirees living in Europe.   

These two things could be immediately and unilaterally implemented by the UK even before the start of the article 50 negotiations. 

We then would like to see that when article 50 is triggered, before any other negotiations, people are put first.  We want to see that ALL the rights of UK citizens living in Europe are dealt with before any other matters. These would be an agreement on continued right to healthcare, a continued right to reside in their respective EU states, a continued right to work, a continued right to run a business, and continued recognition of qualifications across EU states.   

We also felt that to give peace of mind to millions of UK nationals living across Europe, that this agreement needs to be formally announced, when agreed, and not at the end of the two year negotiation process. The bill would still have to pass UK MPs but at least it would give us an idea how to plan for the future. 

HERE ARE SOME NUMBERS

For those of you who watched the hearing you will notice that I quoted some figures at the start which I would like to  quote here again because as these were made available to me I started to understand the potential crisis that could unfold before our eyes should we not try to, at the very least, have our basic rights to live, work, running a business and recognition of qualifications set out in the article 50 process. 

According to UN statistics, there are approximately 1.2 million - 2 million UK Nationals living in the EU. Since the 1990's, 90% of these people have been recorded as working age individuals and the largest proportionate age group is 26-45 years old. (So the idea of the typical UK National moving to Europe is retired and living in Spain is quite wrong).  At the lowest end of this estimate that is 1 million working age UK Nationals who could be affected if no unilateral or reciprocal agreement is reached. However, we should also factor in the retirees living in Europe who, if they no longer had a right to reciprocal healthcare in their country of resident could be forced to return back to the UK due to the cost of private health insurance and/or the inability to get private health insurance due to pre-existing conditions.  (I cannot imagine a more horrendous and forced change of lifestyle for thousand of retirees if this were allowed to happen).

However, this is not all. This same group of people who are now without health care are faced with the need to relocate back to the UK. Can you imagine a glut of retirees trying to sell their homes in Spain, Italy, France, Germany etc in what we already know is an incredibly difficult property market, and then trying to repurchase a home in the UK, at UK prices (if they do not have one already).  This does not even include the working age UK nationals, and their families, children, parents etc who may no longer have a right to reside, run their businesses or have their qualifications recognized by the state in which they are working

As Jane Golding put it to me in our meeting before the night before the hearing, if hard Brexit were to go ahead we could be talking about one of the biggest refugee crises in Europe outside a period of war. The displacement of millions of UK nationals and EU nationals in the UK. All needing to find alternative employment, purchase or sell properties at the same time, change children's schools, healthcare arrangements, potentially re-educate themselves.  All this in a time of present financial crisis. The possibilities do not bear thinking about. The impact on both the UK, EU and world economy would be catastrophic. 

CAMPAIGNING AT A LOCAL EU LEVEL

In both the first and second sessions of the committee hearing the groups were asked whether we had been trying to rally any support in our respective states in which we live, with local MP's and sympathetic politicians. Thankfully we were prepared for this question and were to answer honestly that we had been making contacts and were fully intending to start contacting MP's in Italy, in our case. Clearly the Italian Referendum has made this impossible until the end of last year, but now I and others are aiming to get in touch with Italian MPs to try and gain some support for our cause here.  

WHY?

You may wonder why this is necessary.  However. we will need some support from the EU side. The importance of having sympathetic politicians in the EU who can help to push the continued right to equal treatment, will be instrumental in negotiating with the UK. I, for one, have never done anything like this before and we are still at the early stages of making contact with anyone but in all the EU states where we are campaigning (mainly Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, France, Portugal, Germany) this will be a focus for some of us moving forward as well as putting continued pressure on the UK government from the multitude of campaign movements in the UK. 

You may think, after all this, that I am very negative about the article 50 process. I am not!  In fact I am quite hopeful that what I described above will never come to pass. However, this time I am not taking any chances. The implications are too great for me, and others, to allow them to pass without any fight.  This is why I have agreed to get involved and will continue to do so until a suitable resolution for all parties is found. 

I really hope that Theresa May's speech on Tuesday last week was merely a 'hard ball' approach to entering negotiations. After all if you enter negotiations asking for everything then you are going to have back down on a lot. If you enter with the view that you are prepared to lose everything, then this bodes well for achieving your objectives. I really hope it is political positioning and nothing else. I cannot honestly believe that the UK government would be so ruthless as to not consider the basic work, life and healthcare requirements of millions of its own citizens. That said, we are talking about strange times and I would not like to assume anything.  Hence, why I am getting involved in the fight to protect us this time. 

On that note, I will leave this E-zine on a happier note. No news taxes have been announced in Italy for 2017!  I will report on the current tax obligations in my next blog. 

Obviously, the Brexit vote has huge implications for those of us residing in Italy and could create numerous financial planning considerations. The main being the necessity to plan correctly and tax efficiently for long term Italian residents.