Ben Pawlowski
A BRITISH expat has described feeling ‘physically sick’ as he prepares to return to his home in Spain following an unresolved three-year battle to get post-Brexit residency which he has labelled as a ‘bureaucratic nightmare’.
Mark Saxby, 56, who teaches English as a foreign language, moved to Valencia from Lancaster in early 2020, shortly before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the United Kingdom’s official withdrawal from the European Union.
Last year, the Olive Press exclusively reported that Saxby undertook a hunger strike – which saw him shed eight kilos within 11 days – in protest against being refused Spanish residency.
Despite the EU-UK withdrawal agreement guaranteeing residency rights for those in the country before Brexit, Saxby fears he could be prevented from entering Spain when he returns from a trip home to Manchester where he taught English over the summer.
After the Covid-19 lockdown eased, Saxby applied for a non-lucrative economic visa, but had his application rejected because he did not have the ‘right kind of private healthcare’ in place between April and May 2021.
He was covered by the EHIC card for the first three months of the year, but his private insurance only came into force in May.
Saxby informed the Valencian authorities that he believed he was covered by a bilateral healthcare agreement between the UK and Spain which ran until June 2021.
However, his attempts to resolve the situation resulted in a bureaucratic merry-go-round, where contact with the Spanish and European ombudsman only directed him back to where he’d come from, ‘provoking further confusion and no resolution’, he said.
His hopes were raised when ‘Solvit’, a unit within the European Commission to resolve disputes with public authorities in EU member states, said they had received several complaints about Spain’s application of the comprehensive sickness insurance (CSI) requirement.
However, he was told that Solvit could not look into individual cases, and instead he needed to consult his legal adviser.
Saxby believes he, alongside other British expats in the EU, was forgotten by the UK government during negotiations for the Brexit withdrawal argument.
He claims he has no representation to argue his case either at a national or EU level.
He said: “We were promised an oven-ready deal but it seems like it’s people like me that got roasted”.
According to The Guardian, a spokesperson for the regional authorities in Valencia said: “No documentation was provided [by Saxby] to refute the denial. After this appeal, there is no record that the interested party filed a contentious appeal”.
“Regarding the references made in his complaints to Solvit, no communication has been received in this unit regarding the files of the interested party, nor have they interpreted the reason for the complaint regarding other citizens affected by Brexit”.
