HB circular on Croatia

A16/2013 contains the following statement:

“10.  Croatian students will not satisfy the HRT and will therefore not have an entitlement to income-related benefits”

I cannot understand where they have got this from at all.  The transitional provisions in Annexe V of the accession treaty are concerned with access to the job market - same deal as for A8 and A2 nationals before.  In every other respect Croatian nationals are regular EU citizens now.

I suppose you could make the following statements about European students generally:

- if they are using an EHIC card for medical insurance, that implies they retain their underlying residence in another member state and so they fail the factual part of the HRT
- they are supposed to have enough funds to be self-supporting, but this is framed in the Directive as an up-front undertaking rather than a continuing requirement, probably to reflect the Court’s decision in Grzelczyk.  And the UIT has suggested that having enough income £1-for-£1 to meet your outgoings but retaining tapered entitlement to HB is not inconsistent with self-sufficiency.  So R2R as a self-sufficient student and entitlement to income related benefits are not necessarily 100% mutually exclusive.
- most students won;t get income related benefits anyway for the simple reason that they are students: nothing to do with being European.  But if they are eligible in the same way that a UK student can be eligible, then they can still qualify.

All of the above applies to European students generally anywhere though, from Helsinki to Heraklion and from Tallinn to Tipperary.  There is nothing special about a Croatian student.  Right?

Very probably right.  I might have a look at what the regs actually say, but I doubt that it bears very much relation to this statement.  Can they really say that every person who happens to be a student and a Croatian won’t meet the HRT?  On what basis? Very important not mistake anything written in a HB Circular for the actual law!

Had a think about this. Clearly any foreign national in the UK purely to do a course of education with the intention to leave at the end of it may struggle to show habitual residence, but this ignores everything else that might be going on in a given case. So this blanket statement by the DWP would seem totally inappropriate, and certainly there are no regs which apply only to Croatian students (as one might infer from reading this statement in this circular).