The Home Office has apologised to hundreds of EU citizens who applied for settled status in the UK after it accidentally shared their details.
The Home Office sent about 240 personal email addresses in an email, which could amount to a breach of the Data Protection Act. The department blamed the incident on an administrative error.
In a statement to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the Home Office said it had since improved its systems and procedures. It might nevertheless have to make an apology in parliament.
Applicants had received an email from the department on Sunday asking them to resubmit their information. But the addresses of other applicants to whom the email had been sent were not hidden.
The Home Office then sent another email urging recipients to delete the previous one.
Natasha Jung, a recipient of the email, shared the Home Office’s follow-up email on Twitter and wrote: “Sunday evening I had my data breached by the Home Office. When will the UK wake up and realise that EU citizens are being treated as second-class citizens? We have had zero say in the entire process, despite Brexit affecting us the most.”
On Monday, the immigration minister, Caroline Nokes, had apologised to the Windrush generation after about 500 private email addresses were mistakenly shared with recipients of a mailing list for the compensation scheme.
More than 400,000 European nationals have so far applied to secure their stay in the UK after Brexit, according to government figures.
The EU settlement scheme, which was set up to formally grant EU citizens the continued right to live and work in the UK after Brexit, has received about 200,000 additional applications since it went live at the end of last month.
Critics have repeatedly said the system is slow and too bureaucratic.
A Home Office spokesman said: “In communicating with a small group of applicants, an administrative error was made which meant other applicants’ email addresses could be seen.
“As soon as the error was identified, we apologised personally to the 240 applicants affected and have improved our systems and procedures to stop this occurring again.”
