Realising EU welfare rights: administrative gatekeeping and the accessibility of EU law

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What do EU rights mean in practice? What are the hidden barriers to accessing EU rights in the UK? Are those rights accessible for citizens with disabilities? This project seeks to tackle these questions, to expose academic theory, and media misinformation, to some practical reality. EU migrants, and their families are the focus of much ill-informed media coverage as benefit tourists, and some of the 'tightening' of the benefits system has anti-migrant undertones while other aspects of welfare reform may well impact disproportionately on migrants with disabilities. In fact the procedures for asserting rights to EU-law based equal treatment for some benefits, or to cross-border co-ordination for others, involve invoking fiendishly complex EU legal provisions. This project asks whether the claims processes for social assistance and social security benefits for EU migrants create barriers to claiming entitlements. This is a serious question of administrative justice for an increasing section of the UK population. Much theoretical academic study presumes the existence of a migrant worker rights to welfare benefits. However, in practice the pursuit of those rights can be difficult, and the barriers claimants encounter may be especially detrimental to persons with disabilities - creating problems of disability discrimination. But these barriers have not been examined, partly because those working with EU migrants in the social welfare advice sector are not EU specialists, so that EU rights are not fully pursued. This project bridges the gap between the academic legal theory and those giving practical advice to EU migrants, by using both my technical knowledge of EU law, and my CAB case work experience, to pursue EU rights more fully for clients, and to document the barriers we encounter in trying to pursue claimants' best interests, and identify which of those barriers - such as language issues, are specific to EU legal claims. These might include extra procedural requirements or evidential burdens, translation and comprehension issues, problems with information and awareness and the degree of administrative co-ordination between different national benefit offices. This practice-based method is innovative because it takes an empirical, socio-legal and administrative approach to the study of EU law. It will allow me to reach stages of a claim that might not otherwise be reached, so creating the opportunity to study administrative procedures and barriers, which would otherwise go unexamined. Barriers to accessing EU-based rights to welfare call into question the coherence of the co-ordination system as a whole, suggesting something about administrative cultural hostility to EU claims, which in turn leads to questions of citizenship and accountability. Barriers to the pursuit of EU rights will result in an uneven distribution of those 'rights', so this project will consider the impact of those barriers in the context of disability, and examine them as potentially disproportionately affecting access to EU rights for persons with disabilities - an effect that in itself would be contrary to EU principles. This will not only raise big questions about the meaning of European citizenship, and whether EU rights still operate along the principles of the 'playboy directive' by catering only for the privileged, but it will also open up opportunities to identify ways of accommodating/adjusting procedures where possible. As well as a number of academic outputs, I plan to produce an 'advising EU migrants' toolkit, to help identify rights, to take adviser through the claims process, to flag up potential barriers, and suggest strategies for tackling them. My results should also feed into policy papers, to inform, and make suggestions to, administrative decision-makers, and to provide evidence for organisations campaigning for administrative justice and working in the interests of EU migrants and/or persons with disabilities.