Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment he has made of problems with the EU Settlement Scheme application system not recognising diacritical markings, such as umlauts, in EU nationals' names; and what plans he has to resolve those problems.

The Home Office is putting in place measures to ensure that the EU Settle-ment Scheme is streamlined, user-friendly and accessible to all prospective applicants. We attempt to eliminate perceived errors translating special char-acters by using technology to read data direct from the passport Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) – the text at the bottom of a passport and passport chip.

The MRZ does not include special characters such as diacritical marks and neither does the chip in the document. This is in line with International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standard for passports that all EU passports adhere to. The ICAO standard provides translation matrices for each marking to the English alphabet. However, in some cases there are options that can be chosen for the same letter with diacritical marks, so transforming the name back to one with diacritical marks can be complex. We feel it is im-portant that a person’s online status should reflect their true name with dia-critical marks, something that does not happen where physical documents are issued.

However, as diacritical marks are not recognised or recorded across govern-ment and other public services (where names are often recorded from the name in the MRZ of the passport), the matching to this data is less affected, though it also depends upon how employers enter the name of the employee.

The beta test phases have provided us with a useful opportunity to prove var-ious elements of the scheme functionality and we continue to refine the han-dling of special characters including how this could apply retrospectively to any applicants who may want their data to be corrected.