mica painter

Hi, my husband and I are looking to move back to the UK late this year. He is Italian (I'm British) and lived in the UK from 2013 to 2018 and had full time jobs in that whole period. We've been living in Italy for almost 3 years. We have questions with what documents he needs to provide as evidence, the helpline was useless and I ended up emailing them for help but just got a generic reply not answering my questions.

Most of his documents were held in an now obsolete email account that he can no longer access. I know he only needs to prove he lived there for only 6 months of each of the 5 years he was there but I don't think he has enough variety of documents to cover this.

The documents he does have are:

• Two P45's that cover 2 jobs (he had more jobs) but they only cover just under 5 years, but his NI number should show he has worked the whole time there?
• He has monthly bank statements but not yearly (maybe he can ask the bank for these?)
• He also has a few payslips.
• A National Insurance number.

As all his bills were included in his rent to a friend, so he doesn't have any bills to show where he lived.

Would he need to provide any other evidence for proof of address? Or does it not matter the variety of evidence but more that all the dates are covered? So, say he only has bank statements would that be sufficient?

Thank you in advance. BritInParis can you help?

BritInParis

You shouldn’t need anything other than his NINO providing he worked and paid NICs. If he was in the UK for more than five years but the system only offers him pre-settled status then you can opt to provide further evidence and it will tell you which six month periods you need to cover in order to get settled status. It is worth doing this as he will then qualify for British citizenship after three years back in the UK.

mica painter

Thanks for the reply. Yeah you'd think but I don't know if there's some technical problem as when we entered his NI it came back as saying they couldn't find sufficient information and that he'd need to provide further evidence. Do you think it's worth calling them? It's just expensive to call from abroad and I already wasted 20 minutes in a queue before giving up. I don't know why his NI number wouldn't be enough?

BritInParis

How many employers did he have?

mica painter

5

BritInParis

That’s quite a few but do you think you could obtain letters from them confirming his employment dates?

mica painter

I got it wrong, it's 4. I just rang them up and they said their surface checks just didn't show anything on his NI number. But that I can just submit lots of monthly bank statements and any other evidence we have. They kept asking about what he's doing now though and maybe it's because he hasn't been living there since 2018 but I thought that didn't matter? I thought it only matters if he was living there for 5 years or more anytime.

SanDiegogirl

Maybe he worked but not 'officially' if there is little work record on his NIN

How do the P45's show 5 years employment? You get P45's when you leave a job.

mica painter

Yeah he worked officially, nothing dodgy. so not sure why it didn't show anything. Maybe because he isn't working there now? I meant that the p45's would show the employers he worked for as they would have the company's PAYE reference number on them plys his National Insurance number that has his employment record.

mica painter

Just thought I'd post an update with some good news and for anyone else looking at doing the same to provide some hope/information. We received an official letter today telling us that my husband has been granted settled status with indefinite leave to remain! So, thank you for the advice. I managed to call up the helpline and someone guided me. We uploaded a lot of documents, you can upload as many as you want, it's only 10 at a time but you can keep uploading. Sometimes the gov site isn't clear enough on this stuff.
The documents we uploaded were bank statements, we picked 6 months from each year during the 5 year period. But we actually covered 6 years worth as that was how long he'd been in the UK and uploaded a total of 36 months of bank statements. The only other documents we had were two p45s for one year and 2 payslips in two different years. We just made sure we had at least 6 months proof for each year. Hope that might help someone else going through the same. Such a relief to not have to worry about Brexit now and didn't expect it to be so quick, I guess I've gotten used to the slow Italian bureaucracy

BritInParis

Excellent result, thanks for coming back to let us know

mica painter

No problem