SEVENTEEN WEEKS

Most of our friends in France have lived in France full time since long before Brexit and have a ten year carte de séjour (CDS).  Some squeaked in under the pre-Brexit withdrawal agreement, getting a five year CDS at the last minute.  Some don't need anything at all, their Irish passports giving them the right to live here regardless as EU citizens, which is what we had with our EU passports before Brexit.  After Brexit, and as British passport holders, we lost our automatic right to live, (or work or study) in France, Spain, Italy, or any EU country.  To do so we are now subject to a complex system of visas and residency permits in order to spend anything other than a short holiday here.

We also have many friends who live here part time, being second home owners, and they grapple with the 90/180 Schengen rule, juggling dates and visas to spend their 180 days here per year.  

So, having fewer family responsibilities since my father died in 2022, we had an "it's now or never" moment.  We decided to take the plunge and make our house in France our permanent residence so we could spend most of our time here instead of constantly juggling visas and Schengen rules and having to leave the house empty for long periods.  Other people do it, how hard can it be?  As residents in France we could still, if we wish, spend up to 180 days per year in the UK with no Schengen or visa complications whatsoever.  There is no 90/180 rule governing how we return to the UK: it’s all the other way round.

The process post Brexit is complicated. 

The first thing we had to do was to get a form called an "S1” from the UK government department for work and pensions (DWP).  This document tranfers the responsibility for our health care to France although the cost of it is paid by the UK.  We had to give a start date from which the transfer is immediate.  This arrangement between the UK and French governments for health care of British citizens living in France provides them with the same health care as French citizens, paid for by the UK government. We chose a start date of 7th March 2023.

An S1 form has a start date but does not expire and is valid until it is no longer needed.  If the holder wishes to return to the UK the S1 can be reversed by a phone call to the DWP and health care reverts to the UK on the date of leaving France.

The next step was that in February we 2023 we applied to the French government for a twelve month visa at a cost of around £300 (I shall refer to the total cost for the two of us each time).  This cannot be done online but has to be in person at one of the three UK offices of an organisation called "TLS", who handle all kinds of French visa applications, our nearest being in Manchester. We had to show evidence of sufficient income, health care (our S1), having somewhere to live; all so that we could prove we could live and support ourselves in France without aid from the French state. We took our folders bulging with passports, birth certificates, marriage certificates, bank statements and every bit of paperwork we could think of that might be needed plus new sets of photos.  More photos and fingerprints were taken for our "biometrics" while we were there.

Our passports were duly updated with our one year visas and we "moved to France" i.e. moved to make our French house our principal residence in March 2023.  So far, so good.

Within three months of "moving to France", i.e. to live permanently in our French home, we had to register the visas online on the French Government website at a cost of 450€.  Shortly after that we took our S1 and all the other documents as before, proof of income, residence etc, to the French health and social security service office called CPAM. There we applied for a French Social Security number and a Carte Vitale.  These are the little credit cards that provide access to the French health system and they arrived a few weeks later. 

We were now set up for living permanently in France for one year with a visa and health cards.  The visa would expire after one year but the Carte Vitale remains valid for as long as you keep using it.  All straightforward so far.

In May 2024 we completed our first tax return on paper, delivered it to the tax office in Loches,  and shortly afterwards began paying tax in France.

Two months before our twelve month visas were due to expire, so in January 2024, we applied online to convert them into residency cards - "carte de séjour" or CDS.  Within two weeks we received online a "prolongation", an extension period of three months on our visa which is the three months the French government give themselves to process our application.  Shortly after that we received online a "favourable decision" in other words a document telling us that our application for CDS for one year was approved and that our actual cards would be available shortly.  All very smooth and painless so far, plain sailing, all done and dusted within three weeks. We would receive a text message (SMS) to tell us when the cards were ready, then we could go to the Prefecture in Tours to collect them and pay our fee of 450€ for that year by fiscal stamp.  We already knew that that was the usual process.

The thing is, we never did.  We never received a text message so we didn’t go to get the cards.

Some of our non-British friends said you don't get cards for the first year, only the "favourable decision" certificate which you print off and use for travel and it guarantees your re-entry into France.  What this document says is that this person has had their application for a CDS approved but the cards aren't ready yet.  We had no British person to compare ourselves with i.e. knew no British people who were applying like we were, post Brexit, so assumed this was normal and correct.

It all seemed very odd but seemed to work.  We showed the certificates dutifully every time we returned from a UK visit and they were studied carefully at the passport control but got us back into France every time no problem.  We checked our online account regularly and it always said "cartes en manufacture", not that they were available (“disponible”), and we never got an SMS telling us to go to collect them.

For a whole year we were travelling back to the UK and being allowed to re-enter France by virtue of the online certificate we had printed off called a "favourable decision".   It seemed most odd to be using this months after it was issued but, although it was scrutinised at the border every time and one or two eyebrows were raised, it never failed to get us back into France.

It also seemed odd that for 2024 we hadn't paid anything.  Payment is made by fiscal stamp on collection of the actual CDS cards from the Prefecture but we paid nothing because we were never summoned to collect them by an SMS.  All very strange.  There is no facility to chase up a CDS or follow up the process other than to change details on your account, in fact there is a statement on the application form saying that the Prefecture does not enter into any discussions about it except by email.  We were however able to access our account to see how things were going and added our new French mobile phone number to our details.

We went back to the UK for three weeks at Christmas and soon as we returned to France in January this year we applied to renew our CDS, or our "favourable decision" and immediately came up against a brick wall.  They had no records of when our CDS expired so we couldn't complete the online application.  The only advice given was to contact the Prefecture which can only be done by email.  There is no means to get an appointment to sort the problem out face to face.

We emailed them.  The clock was ticking.  We had no reply.

With only a few weeks before our "favourable decision" for 2024 was due to expire we secured an appointment with a person at a local office of France Services.  These are government outposts, a bit like the UK Citizen's Advice service but with official employees and more clout.  The lady we met with said we needed to sort this problem out soon otherwise we could be deported.  We knew this but it wasn't exactly what we wanted to hear.

It was not a case of someone coming knocking on our door and escorting us to a waiting aeroplane, more that, if we left the country, i.e. went back to the UK for any reason, we would not be allowed back into France and possibly fined under the Schengen rules for overstaying our permitted time. The clock was ticking and there were only a few weeks to go before we effectively had overstayed our welcome.

We were in the lady's office for over one and a half hours, during which time she phoned the Prefecture to try to speak to someone to find out what we should do but kept getting cut off.  At one point she suggested that a solution for us would be to return to the UK and start all over again with a fresh visa.  We pointed out that this was an immensely impractical solution, to reverse everything we had put in place, return to the UK then start all over again was not even remotely possible.  She got back on the phone.

Finally she managed to speak to someone in the Prefecture who was prepared to look at our details and who said the CDS were there, and had been since last February, eleven months ago, and we had not been to collect them.

You can't just go into the Prefecture in Tours without an appointment.  The SMS telling us to collect the cards was the usual way but we never got that.  The lady at France Services persuaded the Prefecture person to send an email there and then, inviting us to go and fetch our cards.  That would suffice as a means of getting into the Prefecture.  She then asked what phone number had been used for the SMS and was told it was an English number, as if that was a major problem.  When she read out the number it was nothing at all like ours.

Armed with the emailed letter, we went to the Prefecture and collected our cards on 21st January when they had six weeks left on them, paying our 450€ for them.  It transpired that they had sent an SMS to an entirely fictitious mobile number which was nothing like the UK mobile number we had given with our application.  UK mobile numbers have more digits than French ones, requiring the international code, and if they are not acceptable they do not fit in the space allowed on French websites.  Ours had not been rejected.

After queueing up to get the cards we asked the person handing them out to show us the envelopes they were in.  The phone number had been Tippexed out and altered into nothing like our number.  To me it looked like they had tried to make it look French, omitting the international code and the last digit.  No wonder we never received the text.

I did a little experiment.  If you telephone a number that is entirely fictitious you get a message saying not connected, try again.  If you send a text message to a fictitious number you get nothing, no indication that the text was neither sent nor received.  

The totally mystifying thing is that 

a) the website for online application to apply for a CDS will accept a UK mobile number if it can't be used.

b) a Prefecture department whose purpose is to deal with immigration can't seem to handle anything other than a French mobile number.

c) an employee at the Prefecture should think it's ok to alter a phone number to something entirely made up with the consequence that the SMS is not delivered.

d) there is no follow up process for uncollected cards that have been sitting in their envelopes in a cardboard box for several months.  

They had three other means of contacting us in our dossiers; our house address, our email address (which had been used several times) and our landline phone number.  If they had looked at our dossier more recently they would have seen the addition of a French mobile number, but only one SMS had ever been sent, to a false number.

For eleven months we had blithely been using a stupid piece of paper printed off from the internet in the belief that our cards were not ready yet just because one individual had made up and messaged a false phone number.

So, armed with our 450€ worth of nearly out of date CDS we applied online to renew them thinking all of our information was exactly the same as last time when we met the criteria and were accepted within three weeks. It should be plain sailing. We were wrong.

Several weeks later, only two days before our CDS expired, we received our prolongations, again allowing the Prefecture a further three months, until June this year, five months after we first attempted to renew the cards, to process our applications, along with some questions.  Other people told us it was now normal for applications to take twelve weeks to process and there were always questions.  The three week turnaround of last year is a thing of the past.

The questions seemed odd.  Our information and therefore applications were exactly the same as the previous year, and for each other, yet they asked Nick for information they didn't ask me for and vice versa.  They wanted an image of the reverse of my nearly out of date CDS and other information that was all documented in our application.  It didn't make sense.

We replied by return of email and several more weeks passed with no further communication.  Our CDS expired and I returned to the UK for a short visit using our prolongation (extension to our expired cards).  More week passed and we got more questions.  Alarm bells rang.  

We knew that we satisfied all the requirements, on income, health cover and accommodation, yet the questions had a threat of refusal in them.  It seemed to us that the person handling our case did not know or understand the health care agreement between the UK and France and were making demands which suggested they were applying a completely different set of criteria.  We emailed the lady at France Services and went to see her again.

She agreed.  The questions did not make any sense and there were definitely no grounds on which we could be refused renewal of our CDS.  She had already sent an email to the Prefecture asking for clarification but received no reply.  So, being unable to get through on the phone at all this time, she emailed the Prefecture again about our case.  She told them that we have the more than the minimum income requirement, we have French health cover (Carte Vitale), own our own house, pay tax in France and are not asking for social security benefits so what was the problem?   She asked if at least we could have an appointment to see someone at the Prefecture to talk about it.

More weeks went by.  She had no response to her emails and we received no communication whatsoever.  We started to get nervous.  Our CDS were long since expired, the deadline for them processing our applications was only weeks away, what would we do if they said "NON!"

The lady at France Services didn't know how it worked if we were refused; if the refusal was double checked by someone else, how quickly we would have to leave, or if there was a process to challenge the decision.

Everyone said "you must surely be able to appeal".  After so many weeks of uncertainty we didn't think we had the stomach for it.  And we would have to do it all over again next year as a CDS is only valid for one year until you get to your fifth year of living in France and this is our third.  Mentally we were preparing ourselves for a return to the UK.

Finally, seventeen weeks after our first attempt to renew our cards, we received our "favourable decision", the right to stay living in France for another year, backdated to 7th March.  Except that that's not quite how it happened.  We actually got an email from the lady at France Services to say she had had an email saying a decision had been made.  Shortly after that we got the notice from the Prefecture.

Our theory is that her email finally came to the top of the inbox of the person dealing with emails who looked into our case and instructed someone to accept our applications.  That if it wasn't for her intervention we might easily have been getting a "NON" in a few weeks' time when the three months of our prolongation was up.

It has been a very long seventeen weeks, immensely frustrating and stressful, and at our time of life, we can do without it.   

We now have a breathing space before we have to begin the process of reapplying again in about six months' time.  During that breathing space we will reflect on whether we really want to go through this every year, all thanks to Brexit, with all the jeopardy that comes with the bureaucracy.

We are immensely grateful to the lady at France Services who, for now, saved our bacon and gave us this breathing space.  We love it here and are not ready to pack up and go back to the UK at this stage but the thought of having to do this all over again fills us with a certain amount of dread and doubt.

Meanwhile we await the SMS telling us to attend the Prefecture to collect this year's CDS cards and pay our 450€.  At least we know they have a phone number they should be able to use this time, so we can hope.