Brexit paperwork

There are lots of English language Facebook pages dedicated to living in Spain and aimed at Britons. There are Citizens Advice pages, Civil Guard authored pages, one from the British Consulate and subject specific pages like After Brexit and more. They are all alive with Brexit problems. Twitter is also aglow with similar stuff. Originally it was pros and cons but now it's practicalities. Apparently, since January 1st, British people who live in Spain, but are in the UK, have been bumping into problems getting home. Some of it seems to be the teething problems of new requirements at the border - the officials don't recognise the documentation and stuff written in Spanish makes no sense to them - but it has left people stranded.

One of the things that sometimes makes me snigger and sometimes exasperates me is the lack of understanding and failure to grasp the basics of the paperwork that most of us have here in Spain. I can't guarantee the accuracy of the rest of this post but, so far as I know, it's correct.

The Spaniards lived under two dictatorships in the 20th Century. The better known one had Franco as its Head of State. He introduced an identity card system and as a part of that Spaniards were issued with a unique identification number similar to the VIN on my car but shorter. The Spanish ID is called the DNI, Documento Nacional de Identidad and it has 8 digits and one verification letter which is generated by a mathematical formula. Spaniards older than 14 have to have an individual DNI, it's an offence not to have one. So the format is 12345678Z

Spaniards are identified by their DNI, it was originally a sort of tax identifier but now it's linked to everything from buying a mobile phone to passports. Because not everyone who wants to buy a property or a boat in Spain is Spanish there had to be something similar for foreigners. The similar document for foreigners is the NIE - the Foreigner's Identification Number, Número de identidad de extranjero. The NIE is really a tax identification number but, just like the DNI, it is now linked to so much more. The number is made up of an initial letter followed by seven digits and then a verification letter. The start letter is either an X or a Y. So the format is X1234567L or Y1234567X

Foreigners who want to live in Spain have to comply with a variety of conditions. Provided things are as they should be they are issued with an Identity Card or Residence Card and that card will carry their NIE. That's what happened to Maggie when she got a job here in the 1990s. She got the Residence Card because she had a job. The process included being fingerprinted and photographed. When we came house hunting in Spain, before we lived here, we went to a police station to get an NIE. I was issued with one but Maggie didn't need one because the number issued to her in the 1990s was still good. The NIE was just a piece of white A4 paper. 

Once we'd moved here we applied for Residence Cards. On the very day that I went to get my fingerprints done to get that card it was abolished for European Citizens.  I was literally in a queue to get the card and turned away. The reason the cards were abolished was because I was not a foreigner, I was a European citizen and we European citizens had rights in the member countries. Some European agreement, possibly Maastricht, said that the Spaniards couldn't demand that we Britons carry a Spanish ID card. The reasoning being that whatever our National Identity Document was (passport in our case) it was sufficient to move anywhere in Europe. The same would be true for French, Dutch, Belgians, Luxembourgians, Italians and so on. The new system would be  a register of European Citizens living in Spain. 

Maggie and I registered as soon as the new process came into being, probably around 2007. We were given a piece of A4 paper which had lots of green on it. This green certificate which was actually officially the Certificado de Registro de Ciudadano de la Unión or Registration Certificate for a Citizen of the Union was proof that we'd registered with the National Police as being resident in Spain. In time that certificate changed shape and size to be a sort of paper card but its purpose was very much the same. Everybody I know calls that certificate/card the Residencia.

Then came Brexit. When it was complete we would be foreigners again. Not European Citizens. Foreigners, such as Canadians, Mauritians and Chinese, living in Spain have a card which is called a Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero or a Foreigners Identity Card. I'm not sure whether it was by negotiation or because the Spaniards baulked at the idea of re-registering the approximately 300,000 Britons resident in Spain that it was decided that the green bits of paper and the green cards would continue to be valid for Britons to show that they had registered correctly before the end of the transition year and were legal to continue living in Spain from the start of 2021. There was also the offer to swap the green certificate for an ID card much like the ones carried by Spaniards and foreigners, a TIE card, but without most of the usual bureaucratic palaver. That system started in summer 2020 and Maggie and I went and got ours as soon as we could.

To recap then the NIE is simply an ID number and has nothing specifically to do with residence. The green residence certificate or card and the special Brexit TIE card all show that someone who was living here before 31 December 2020 has continuing resident status and is legally living here. There are also, apparently, letters of intent which show that Britons were living here with their rights as Europeans but that the authorities didn't have time to process the paperwork before Big Ben chimed the last EU hour. Provided they complete the process they too will be legal.

There is another piece of paper which we Brits usually call the padrón. Each municipality keeps a register of the people who live there. This register is used for statistical purposes, as the census for funding for municipalities and as the basis of the electoral roll. Under some circumstances the "padrón" gives you some rights but for most Britons it simply registers us to an address. Often, if you want to carry out something financial, like entering into a loan agreement, you'll need a "padrón" that's no more than 3 months old but the "padrón" has nothing to do with residency status.

Obviously there are Britons who have recently moved to Spain and all this new paperwork must have been horrible for them. I sympathize because Covid has slowed everything down and getting an appointment has been hampered by unscrupulous characters who have found a way to profit out of selling on the appointments. 

On the other hand I have been amazed by the number of people who have lived here for years and years and have also been involved in the last minute scrabble. People who have always renewed their UK driving licences by using a family member's UK address, people who have never got around to getting one of the green certificates and maybe aren't even on the padrón. Some of those people seem to be blissfully unaware of anything that is going on around them. Back at Twitter and Facebook I have seen people who have no idea which document is which and what it's good for. And can you imagine the Customs Official at Stansted presented with a letter of intent to apply for this or that in flowery Spanish when their briefing says to only allow residents to travel?

Mistaken identity

I went to pick up my new Foreigner's Identity Card this morning. All pretty straightforward. I'm now an immigrant foreigner instead of being identified as a Citizen of the European Union. I've never cared for the glib way we Britons use the term expat. I think that it borders on the racist. It's a semantic dodge to try to make a clear division between immigrants and us. Now there's no doubt about it at all. I'm a foreigner living here with a card to prove it. Just like a Cambodian or Cameroonian.

As I was waiting in the queue a couple of things crossed my mind. I was quite happy to be getting the card and yet I'm dead set against ID cards. They are an obvious and essential means of control. Nobody would try to run a totalitarian Government without first having everyone registered and documented. When Dicky Attenborough and Gordon Jackson were getting on the bus in the Great Escape what were they asked for? Exactly. Documentation. Spain introduced ID cards during the Franco dictatorship and it still maintains them.

And the fingerprints too. The Spanish authorities now have my fingerprints, as well as the fingerprints of anyone who has an identity card. That's nearly everyone in Spain. In Hollywood films, the scene with the mug shot and fingerprints was when the person, guilty or innocent, was branded as criminal. I seem to remember, though I may well be wrong, that, in the UK, fingerprint records are kept only for proven criminals and, of course, immigrants.

There was a small queue outside the Police Station. There was a police officer on the gate. He came and went, he even answered questions. I set out to ask him if we're in the right queue a couple of times but we seemed to work like the same poles of magnets - as I approached he retreated. Maggie and I really knew though, from the general question and answer as people arrived, that everyone in our queue thought we were in the right queue. Once past the gate and into the courtyard of the Government Office it became clearer. There were two queues in the courtyard, one for the people who need to be spaced out in time, people with appointments, people who are renewing cards and the other, quicker queue, for people like us, who are just picking something up that has already been processed and should only take a couple of minutes.

I've often commented that information in Spain tends to be handed out sparingly and not willingly. This morning I messaged our Town Hall to ask what time the team that carries out repairs on the water distribution system considers to be "office hours" and the response was that they did not have that information available - they even used that sort of reasonably formal language - they didn't say, "Sorry, we don't know, you'll have to ask in such and such office," they said "At the current time that information is not available to us. You will need to enquire in such and such office". When we were in Alicante waiting for the card I thought how easy and how useful a couple of notices would be for we dazed and confused.

Inside the office I hand over my passport to prove that I'm me as I collect a document that proves that I'm me. As a secondary check they scan my fingerprints and check them against their records. The computer bleeps and it's access granted. The two women on the desk have a brief conversation about the card I'm collecting. It's a new style card and for one of the two women it's her first sight of one. They laugh that my white hair blends into the background on my photo. That's something else I've often noted about Spanish "officials". Nobody, in all the Government offices I've ever been in has treated me badly. Sometimes the result isn't what I would want but there's never any "I, Daniel Blake", about it.

Order, order

There seems to be a bit of a conspiracy to keep me on my toes as I reach the end of my working life. Most of it is positive enough. Pension paper mostly. Having found forgotten private pensions I've had to make phone call after phone call and fill in myriad forms. Because I live here and not where the pensions are I've had to talk with the tax people in the UK and fill in more forms to get myself exempted from UK tax. That Spanish tax process, for the calendar year 2018, starts in a few days time and has to be done before the end of June. I hope that having got the UK exemption means it will be easier, if more expensive, to sort out.

Then there's the state pension. I did a blog about that. I hoped, I was told, it would be paid through the Spanish Social Security people in Euros but, disappointingly, it now looks as though it's going to be paid in the UK in Pounds.

And what about Brexit. Now, to be honest what happens in the UK isn't very important to me. I certainly don't give a toss about the puerile posturings of a bunch of public school boys (and girls) in Parliament but their pompous hubris is making it reasonably difficult to work out what's going to happen to us.
In general the statements from the Spanish, and British, governments have been dead positive. All about our current situation being protected and so forth provided the other country plays along. But there's a lot of difference between a ministerial statement and what happens in some hot office awash with foreigners trying to get various bits of paper in a language we have problems with. Obviously, as soon as we Britons are out of the Union, we have to do things exactly as Malawians or Russians or Canadians. All of us are from "third countries" as far as Spain is concerned. There are at least 300,000 Brits in Spain, maybe more. The problem is that we've never quite understood why Johnny Foreigner wants us to jump through their stupid hoops. Why the hell should I change my UK driving licence for a Spanish one?, what's the point of registering with the local council?, why would I want to pay Spanish taxes instead of British ones?, come off the doctor's list in Barnstaple? - not on your nelly. So, there has been a bit of a scramble amongst we immigrants to get our paperwork sorted before we lose all those automatic rights that being a European Citizen gave us.

Of course if you want to be certain of staying in Spain it's easy enough to become Spanish. You do a test to prove you can speak Spanish and another to prove that you know something about the country you live in. So being able to answer simple questions, the sort of thing a Briton would know about the UK- for instance "Which Officer of State has precedence after the Royal Family?" The sort of thing every Briton knows, or here, the sort of thing that every Spaniard knows. Yeah, right. Most of us can't handle B1 Spanish and as for the Spanish constitution you can forget that. And maybe we want to stay British because, technically, we have to renounce our British Nationality if we become Spanish. Anyway, there's quite a long waiting list from lots of people who've run away from terror regimes or are looking for a newer, better life.

I thought we were pretty sorted, pretty Brexit proof. I'm very timid and tend to do as I'm told. After all we do live here, our house is here, our cats are here, we don't live anywhere else or have money and property overseas.  We pay Spanish taxes, we vote in Spain, our doctor and dentist is here, my driving licence and my road tax is Spanish, I listen to Spanish radio and I buy my clothes in Spain. I've probably spent less than a month in the UK in the past fourteen years. But it now looks as though, having checked the details pretty thoroughly beforehand, there has been a bit of history rewriting and we may be one piece of paper short of the full hand. It's odd because it's a piece of paper that I have helped other people to obtain. It's probably not going to be much of a problem. But, it could be. And for some people something similar will be a problem. They will find that they can't fulfil some requirement or other and so can't get residence here and they'll wonder what to do with the house they bought that they shouldn't live in all year or the car that they shouldn't drive.

Never mind. Oh the Archbishop of Canterbury and then Lord Chancellor but all we Britons knew that.

Just get the form, fill it in and get it notarised

I still look at various expat forums every now and then. On one of the forums, the administrators try to rouse the troops a little with something they consider to be potential conversation starters. One of the questions that's cropped up a couple of times is about cultural differences. I maintain, and I still maintain that the differences between Spain and the UK are minimal. I don't mean that the two countries are the same but the basic premises on which they run are very similar and lead to similar ways of doing things.

In Spain traffic is organised and regulated, doctors wait, stethoscope poised, in health centres, dustbin lorries come with monotonous frequency, I can take photos of more or less what I want, I don't have to join a particular political party to prosper, health and safety laws are strong, you are unlikely to be slaughtered in a gunfight, slavery and human trafficking are not tolerated, the state doesn't kill people, there are laws to protect animals and consumers, entering and leaving the country is a reasonably simple process, I, and more particularly women, can dress as we wish, my internet access is not controlled or censored, people are not persecuted for their ethnicity, corruption is punished, bribery is not endemic, people pay their taxes and a long etcetera. Now that doesn't mean that everything is fine but, without needing to look at a map or consult Google, we are not talking about the problems you might encounter in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Myanmar, China, Nigeria, South Africa, The United States, Mauritania, Tibet, North Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Uzbekistan or Cuba.

I'm not saying that everything is hunky dory. Gitanos, gypsies (and I've never heard anyone suggest Romany People) get treated badly in tens of ways, there are racists here as there are everywhere, rich people find life much easier than poor people, transexuals get a rough time at school, children are abused by adults, the legal system seems to work better for the rich than the poor, dogs are abandoned in the streets and some donkeys, and sometimes trades unionists, get beaten with sticks. There are prostitutes controlled by evil pimps, there are laws which can be used to limit what I consider to be basic freedoms and builders will sit atop scaffolding dressed in shorts and flip flops and then suggest you pay in cash without the need for VAT. At times the process for getting planning permission or an insurance claim sorted out can seem interminable. I could go on.

I can't pretend that I don't notice the differences. But differences have a way of becoming normal. It's ages since we had to deal with the skein of bureaucracy that we had to deal with when we first got here. Residence documents, identity documents, registering with town halls, this and that piece of paper, new bank accounts, new insurance policies, cars to be bought, phone contracts to be sorted, new power suppliers to be compared, builders to be hired and a hundred more things, right down to recognising bleach in the supermarket, were a challenge at first. Those things came in an avalanche of activity. Nowadays they come along one at a time. It's just as much of a pain in the backside getting a new passport from the British as it is exchanging a driving licence with the Spanish. I'm helping somebody get a document we all call a residencia at the moment. The paperwork isn't particularly complicated but there is lots of detail that's a bit tricky. Just dealing with that one thing reminded me of that deluge of paper at the beginning. It's a miracle anyone survives it. It must be exactly the same for anyone heading for the UK from elsewhere.

Of course I actually keep a weather eye out for the differences because they give me to something to blog about. Visitors are good for reminding you just how many things have become ordinary that aren't that ordinary to a British sensibility. We have visitors at the moment. We popped out last night to see the statue of Santa Catalina get moved from one house to another during the fiesta in her honour, had a look at the mediaeval market and just strolled around. The people milling all over the place, the apparent disorganisation of it all, the actual idea of shifting a statue around escorted by a brass band, the unshaven priest, the mayor mixed up in the crowd, the number of police officers on hand, the odd looking buildings, children on the street quite late in the evening, not paying at a bar until you're about to go, bonfires set up in the middle of the road and complete strangers offering you glasses of wine or barbecued sausage were all just a bit different. And we were only out for a couple of hours.

Mind you it's not all whimsical drollness. I had to work this morning so Maggie has taken our guests off to a bodega and restaurant after. Whilst they've been away, I've been talking to a pal who appears to have been swindled over the sale of the kit to heat her pool. She's bumping into something else that is just as normal a part of everyday life in Spain. The difficulty of complaining when something does go wrong. Again I'm not so sure that's all that different from the UK but it can seem like a very uphill process when you are faced with the intransigence of a company, a company that doesn't answer your phone calls or return your emails, a company that speaks a different language and a company that knows its way around whatever legislation there is much better than you do.

Ho, ho! Sigh.

My draft tax declaration became available online the other day. Because I was self employed for a while in the 2015 tax year I'm going to need an accountant to sort it out but I'm putting off ringing him till my UK tax documentation turns up. Curiosity got the better of me though and I thought I would have a look at the online version to see what the tax office's initial assessment was. Rebate or more to pay?

On the first page, more or less in the first line, I noticed that my name was wrong. Although the effect on the printed form looks fine, which is presumably why I've missed it for the past ten years as have various tax offices and accountants, in fact the surnames and first names are mixed up. So they have my name as Jo and my surname as Christopher Thompson. The Jo is because, when I first registered at the Social Security, their database only had room for a forename fourteen characters long so the Christopher John had to be pruned. Heaven knows what Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso - that's Pablo Picasso to you and me - would have done. I quietly closed down the webpage. I'll let the accountant sort that out too.

The firm I work for sent me an email yesterday afternoon telling me that new legislation is coming into force which means that I will need to do something like the very first police record checks that we did in the UK. There is a pretty obvious question as to why anyone is allowed to work with children without being checked but we'll pass that by. The police, or in this case the Justice Ministry, will produce a form to say whether I have a criminal record or not. I asked my employer when this legislation would come into force. The end of the month was the reply. Good to get plenty of notice. Good that my employer is helping me with the process too.

I had a look online. Amazingly the process can be completed via the Internet. Even more amazingly I have an electronic signature which the Ministry site recognised. The form couldn't have been simpler: name and address type information, place of birth and bank payment details. I filled in the form and pushed send. Please fill in the phone number in the approved format it said. It took me four attempts to get that right. There was no suggested format but the international dialling code, with a plus, not two zeros, did the trick. This time it said that the information on my Foreigners Identification Number (NIE) form didn't match what I'd typed in. That's true because, as it turns out, the NIE, which I have used since 2005, is riddled with errors. It has me living in a street in Pinoso, instead of Culebrón, and the postcode is for Sax, a town about 30kms away. I won't bore you with the detail of the reason behind the particular errors but the underlying fault is quite bizarre.

To use a British example. Let's say I lived at 8 Oak Fold, the fold being an alternative to street or drive or avenue. The person who designed the database had never heard of fold as a street name so they left it out of their drop down lists. They didn't think to include a box for free text entry either. They did, however, make it essential that one of the street type names from the drop down list was included in the address. So, the person who is trying to register me on their database, let's say it's Council Tax, does the best that they can and uses Drove as a near equivalent. The form gets processed. The next time, at Vehicle Registration, the fold option is missing again. This time the form filler in chooses Street because that's the most frequent option. No problem to me. I get registered for Council Tax and Vehicle Registration. The problem arises ten years later when I think I live at 8 Oak Fold but Vehicles think I live at Oak Street and Council Tax think I live at Oak Drove and neither can find me.

I was just having a root around the Justice Ministry website. Google told me that its security certificate couldn 't be trusted but I ploughed ahead anyway. Apparently I can download the form, fill it in with a biro and post it to someone. This is quite an unusual Spanish option but it's a good one from my point of view. Actually, as I typed that I wondered if it were true. Lots of times the forms that require payment are triplicate forms which mean that they have to be picked up in person, filled in, paid for over a bank counter and then taken back to the office. Bit of a problem though. The website tells me that there is an intervención técnica - i.e. the site is being fiddled with - and that I have to wait till midnight which was 51 minutes ago as I type.

Ho, ho! Sigh.