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LISBON / MADRID (Reuters) – In October, Michelle Jones and her husband Gary boarded a ferry in England to start a new life in Spain. Had they left it beyond Britain’s transition period out of the European Union, things would have been much more complicated.
“We have no other option, it is now or never,” said the former worker of the housing association in the hairdresser that she took over in the tourist town of Fuengirola, in southern Spain.
“Our family and friends in the UK think we’re crazy to do it” during a pandemic, said Jones, 54, but “we’re not going to go through the gibberish of trying to get visas and things like that.”
Britain formally left the European Union on January 31 after its 2016 referendum, but has since been in a transitional period where the rules on free travel and trade remain unchanged. That period ends on December 31st.
Fourteen European countries, including Portugal and Spain, will grant British arriving before December 31 the right to five years of residence. Other countries have stricter post-Brexit requirements and ask all Britons to reapply after the transition period.
Before the deadline, some people have advanced retirement plans and others have taken advantage of the possibility of working from home to move.
“I spent six months in Europe last summer and loved it so much that I planned to do it every year, but that would no longer be possible,” said Beth Sands, a 35-year-old nutritionist and accountant who moved to Portugal in September. “As soon as Brexit happened, I googled all the ways I could get European citizenship.”
Those who put it off to the last minute had their plans thwarted by Portugal’s announcement on Sunday night that it would close borders to UK travelers who were not yet registered as residents as of Monday in response to the new strain of super infectious virus detected in Great Britain.
“It was supposed to arrive on December 26. It is not going to happen now before Brexit,” a Facebook user posted on a Facebook group for Britons in Portugal late on Sunday.
“A TICKET TO EUROPE”
In the Spanish resort town of Benidorm, insurance broker Sophie Goode says she organized more of the policies many people need to support their residency applications in November than the rest of the year combined.
“Some people have called me from the airport and said ‘We are here, we have to do the paperwork,'” Goode said.
Enrollments for residence in Portugal and Spain have skyrocketed in line with the Brexit deadlines.
In Portugal, 1,453 people – more than double the previous record for monthly registrations – signed up for residency in March 2019, the date Britain was originally due to leave the European Union. Provisional data for November shows that the figure was 2,407.
In Spain, the number of British with residence permits increased by 8.2% from June 2018 to 2019 and by 5.8% more until June 2020, totaling 366,498 people, according to data from the website of the Secretary of State of Migration.
Some of them are longer-term residents who had forgotten to register, but city hall workers, private agents and the British embassy in Portugal said many were newcomers.
“I have the feeling that many of them just came to register an address and collect the certificate,” said Maria Ricardo, who processes residency applications in the municipality of Loule on the Portuguese Algarve coast. “They just want a ticket to Europe.”
To obtain residency, you must have a registered address, be able to support yourself financially, and have access to medical care.
“I wasn’t sure if I would stay, but it’s very easy to get residency and I knew the Brexit deadline was coming so I thought I could do it,” said James Ellsmoor, 27, a business owner and remote worker. which arrived in Lisbon in November.
For Brits who miss the December 31 deadline, moving to a European country will mean complying with rules for non-EU immigrants, possibly including sponsored work visas.
The coronavirus pandemic and unpredictable border closures have added an additional layer of urgency.
“Everything acted like the perfect storm,” said Samantha Harding, 49, who moved to Cascais in Portugal in September. Newly able to work remotely, she decided she was ready to make the switch.
(Reporting by Isla Binnie, Victoria Waldersee; Edited by Janet Lawrence)
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