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right to reside St Prix RELEVANCE

Diogenes
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welfare benefits, citizens advice, sherwood & newark

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my client is Romanian, had a baby and stopped work, told UC that she was not going to return to work until her child is age 3, she had a gap of over a month from stopping work to claiming UC, DWP has said she cannot get UC as she has failed the HRT,  the decision says that St Prix doe snot apply due to the above circumstances, Is there any way round this , cl has no family in UK and seems to ahev no other right to reside . she is a single parent and worked for an agency until leaving to have her baby

HB Anorak
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This is only relevant if she currently has pre-settled status or a pending application under the settled status scheme: otherwise, EEA residence rights are no longer relevant to her.  Is that the case?

Assuming it is, DWP seems to be conflating two rules, one of which isn’t really a rule anyway.  There is retention of status due to unemployment, which requires the person to register as a jobseeker not necessarily within one month (so that’s not a rule) but a.s.a.r.p.  Then there is retention of status due to a maternity break, which does not require the person to register with anyone - many women in that situation won’t be claiming benefits at all at least to begin with.  That is what your client is relying on and it really doesn’t matter at what stage in her maternity break she rocks up as a benefit claimant - the important thing is that the maternity break is still within the “reasonable period of time” of about one year since she stopped work.

These provisions all started life as rules for workers, but case law has gradually extended them to the self-employed, most recently in Dakneviciute where the right to a maternity break was held to apply to self-employed women.

Diogenes
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Hello HB, yes she has pre settled status !!!

Diogenes
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welfare benefits, citizens advice, sherwood & newark

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so do i ask for an MR as UC are not paying and seem confident in their decision !!!

HB Anorak
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Hang on just spotted something that might be a problem there.  She said she won’t be returning to work until the child is 3?  That was not a good idea, she might want to revise her plans and say she has decide she will return to work within a year.

Elliot Kent
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HB Anorak - 11 January 2022 04:02 PM

Hang on just spotted something that might be a problem there.  She said she won’t be returning to work until the child is 3?  That was not a good idea, she might want to revise her plans and say she has decide she will return to work within a year.

Yes I think that’s the critical point.

SFF v SSWP [2015] UKUT 502 (AAC) is the go to case for anything to do with St Prix rights. In order to rely on the rights, the worker must intend to return to work within a ‘reasonable period’ of the child being born. The reasonable period will almost invariably be drawn by reference to when their additional maternity leave would have expired. So there will usually be a need to return to work, or at least work-seeking, within a year of their maternity leave as such starting. (see para 27 on)

In this case, your client’s indication that they are proposing not to return to work at all until the child is three is basically fatal to reliance on the St Prix rights, because they are saying that they do not intend to return to work-seeking within that reasonable period.

She could try to salvage the point on MR/appeal, for example because of having misunderstood what she was being asked. But it is important that she has an intention to return to at least looking for some sort of part-time work within that one year period.

Diogenes
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thank you everyone, yes I am suggesting she changes her plans on when she will return to work, in the mean time she has made a new UC claim without our knowledge but with a partner added to it so it looks’ like this is going to be a nightmare case. JCP are being amazingly helpful but their patience is wearing thin , the language problem is not helping as she has o English, that could have led to errors on her claims