I got chatting to an immigration lawyer at the weekend (friend of a friend) who told me that the whole thing is a futile waste of time and money.
The Home Office identifies citizens of EU Member States (who are actually entitled to be here) who are 'homeless' (as defined) and serves them papers asking them to leave the country or else they'll be deported.
Half of them ignore it, homeless foreigners being notoriously difficult to track down, and half of them fill in a 137-page form (I think he was exaggerating a bit here, but who knows?) applying for leave to remain (or whatever the technical term is), some of them get some of the trick questions wrong and are earmarked for deportation. Most of these then go to an immigration lawyer who knows how to fill in the form correctly and do the appeal cover letter, and then most of these people can stay.
And so on and so forth. Of the handful who are actually deported, most of them are back in the UK within days or weeks.
So far so good.
He also said that the HO identified a lot of people by bullying homeless charities into handing over data, which is easy to appeal against. This sounded like a conspiracy theory to me, but lo and behold, this morning's Metro covered the story.
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