‘How can
I start again at 68?’ Maria has spent 50 years in the UK – and is fighting
deportation
She left
the Netherlands for Britain in the 1970s at just 17. Now, after receiving a
short suspended sentence, she faces removal to a country she hasn’t lived in
for five decades or visited since 1999
Diane
Taylor
Diane
Taylor
Thu 26
Feb 2026 13.19 GMT
Last
December, a letter from the Home Office dropped through Maria’s door. When she
read it, she screamed. At 68, she lives with her disabled partner, Tom, who she
cares for, in a rental home in west London, and has been resident in the UK for
almost 50 years. The letter said the home secretary had decided to pursue her
deportation. “The secretary of state has deemed your deportation to be
conducive to the public good,” it continued, “and accordingly it is in the
public interest that you be removed from the UK without delay.”
The only
thing that ties Maria to the Netherlands, her birthplace, is, she says, her
passport. For most of her five decades in residence in the UK, the country was
part of the EU, so there was no need for her to apply for leave to remain. In
January 2022, she was given EU Settled Status (EUSS), a form of indefinite
leave to remain for EU and other European citizens who had been living in the
UK for five years or more on 31 December 2020.
“I want
to say to the Home Office: ‘Why can’t you just leave me be?’” she says. “I’m a
carer. How can I start my life again at the age of 68 in a country I don’t
know? Somebody at the Home Office who doesn’t know me … has made a decision
about my life. Since I received the letter, I have had so many nightmares.”
For more
than a decade, successive UK home secretaries have tried to outdo each other in
making the country unwelcoming to migrants; the so-called “hostile
environment”. Over the last year, with anti-immigrant party Reform UK racing
ahead in the polls, the Labour government has been talking and acting tough on
immigration, in an attempt to reduce that lead. So it boasts about increasing
deportations from the UK; it’s detaining asylum seekers en masse in preparation
for removing them forcibly to France; has dramatically reduced many work visas
in areas such as health and care; and has reduced the right for people who are
given permission to work or study here to bring their families with them. It
plans, too, to extend the time migrants have to wait before being granted
settlement in the UK. To date, there is no evidence that these policies have
brought disenchanted voters back to Labour.
Maria
first travelled to the UK for a holiday in the long, hot summer of 1976, when
she was 17. She never went home.
She moved
into a squat, at a time when empty buildings in London were plentiful. A
blissful chapter of her life began with her then boyfriend, a roadie for bands
including Squeeze, Van Halen and Eddie and the Hot Rods.
“Things
were so different in those days,” she says. “Everything felt very free and I
was always very positive … I had a small stall at Portobello market and I used
to buy things that were in fashion here and send them back to Holland, where
they were in demand. There was a cafe we used to go to in Westbourne Grove
which introduced me to vegetarian cuisine – things like spinach quiche and
cheesecake.”
Maria had
had a difficult childhood, and spent some of her teens in foster care. After
arriving in the UK, she visited the Netherlands only a handful of times, most
recently in 1999, after her mother died. She never considered a permanent
return.
After
almost 50 years living quietly in the UK, working in various jobs, looking
after Tom and nurturing her much-loved garden, she assumed she would spend the
rest of her life here.
“The UK
is my home,” she says, sitting at her kitchen table with her head in her hands.
“I am absolutely in bits. I cannot believe that the Home Office wants to deport
me after I have lived here for almost half a century.”
Life in
the UK has not always been easy for her. She has been in some difficult
relationships and in 2011 she started a job managing a small hotel in
north-west London that would lead to her current predicament, .
“I had
never planned to manage a hotel,” she says, “but my neighbour at the time took
over a derelict building, spent a long time doing it up and kept saying he
wanted me to manage it, with him as the landlord. She signed a lease, but
“needed to make a profit of £35,000 per month to earn anything from it. I
rarely got that much money, so for a long time I didn’t take any salary.
“I was
very naive and far too trusting,” she says. “I ended up helping people I felt
sorry for, by giving them free accommodation if I had an empty room at the time
and they were homeless on the streets. Sometimes they moved in and refused to
leave.”
She says
that while some of her guests were “absolutely lovely”, others cheated her by
leaving without paying for their stay or stealing equipment such as phones or
laptops. “I tried to help some of the guests who were struggling financially by
signposting them to debt management services. One man nicknamed me ‘Mother
Teresa’. The local council sometimes placed homeless people in the hotel and
there were fights and assaults and gangs.”
Despite
the difficulties, she muddled along, living at the hotel with Tom, and caring
for him.
In 2021,
everything changed. The hotel was on the first and second floors of a building,
while a separate, unconnected restaurant operated in the basement. In August
2021, a fire broke out in the restaurant.
“It was
terrifying,” says Maria. “Just before 9am I heard people in the restaurant
shouting: ‘Fire, fire!’ We were all evacuated. Tom and I became homeless and
lost all of our belongings.”
For a
while, the couple moved around, staying in hotels, living on their savings and
waiting for compensation money from the fire. Eventually, they rented an Airbnb
in west London. Maria initially thought that repairing the fire damage could
take just a couple of months, so she diverted the hotel phone number to her
personal phone and told anyone who inquired about rooms that she hoped the
hotel would soon reopen.
One day
she received a call from a woman whose friend had recommended the hotel to her.
“She told me that she and her friend were desperately looking for a place to
stay in London. Could I help? I told them the hotel was now closed. But I felt
sorry for them and said they could stay in my spare room if they contributed
towards the rent. They agreed and moved in. They said they wanted to attend a
nearby temple, and for the first couple of days I dropped them off and picked
them up from there.”
She says
the two women, who had initially seemed to get along well, started to fight. “I
asked them what was going on and they said it was something ‘private’.” It
turned out one of them wanted to return to Birmingham, where they had both
lived previously, and the other didn’t. “I ended up being protective of the one
who didn’t want to leave and told her she could stay with us,” says Maria. So
she stayed, while her friend returned to Birmingham.
The
second woman was with them for just over a week. The day after the first woman
left, the police knocked on Maria’s door. They told Maria that they had
received reports that someone was being held in the house against their will,
“and that the woman who was still staying in the house accused me of selling
sex on the premises,” she says. This allegation was soon retracted, but Maria
was nonetheless charged with allowing her premises to be used as a brothel.
She told
her solicitor she wanted to fight the charges. But it took several years for
the case to come to court, and when she went to the hearing, she says the
barrister representing her suggested it would be better to plead guilty. That
way she would avoid going to jail, which could happen if she fought her case
and lost.
“This had
been dragging on for two years, and both my partner and I just wanted it to be
over,” she says. “The barrister gave me just a few minutes to make my decision.
I decided to plead guilty so the whole thing could be finished.
“Following
everything I had gone through in the previous few years, I had no fight left in
me, so I followed his advice.” She claims she has never been involved in the
sex trade, either as a sex worker or a pimp.
In
October 2024, she pleaded guilty at Isleworth Crown Court to allowing her
premises to be used as a brothel and received a four-month suspended sentence.
“As a
condition of my probation I had to have 10 therapy sessions – a mental health
treatment requirement. The therapist said my difficult childhood may have
resulted in me being exploited and taken advantage of on numerous occasions.”
Last
year, she tried to put the experience behind her. Then the letter arrived from
the Home Office. After threatening Maria with deportation, it said that the
offence she had been convicted of “has caused serious harm”.
In the
government guidelines for deportation on the grounds of criminality, it states
that it is policy to pursue this where a person has “received a custodial
sentence of 12 months or more for a single conviction for a single offence in
the UK or overseas; has received combined sentences totalling 12 months or more
in the UK or overseas; has received a suspended sentence order (SSO) of six
months or more; [or] is a persistent offender”. None of these pertain to Maria.
But, crucially for her, the government can pursue deportation for anyone who
has been, “convicted in the UK or overseas of an offence which has caused
serious harm,” with that last phrase open to interpretation.
This
country is her only home. She has no family, no support network, and no life to
return to in the Netherlands
A
spokesperson for the Home Office says: “We will not allow foreign criminals and
illegal migrants to exploit our laws. We are replacing the broken appeals
system so we can scale up deportations. All foreign national 0ffenders who
receive a prison sentence in the UK are referred for deportation at the
earliest opportunity.”
Maria’s
immigration lawyer, Naga Kandiah of MTC Solicitors, disputes the government’s
grounds for deportation and says he is deeply concerned by the Home Office’s
actions. “Given the non-violent, victimless nature of the offence and the
minimal sentence imposed, the public interest in deportation is negligible,
while the human cost to her would be severe, irreversible and wholly
disproportionate,” he says. “My client is a 68-year-old EU citizen who has
lived lawfully in the United Kingdom for almost 50 years. This country is her
only home. She has no family, no support network, and no life to return to in
the Netherlands, a country she has not lived in for almost five decades and
last visited in 1999 following her mother’s death. Deportation would tear her
away from the only community, stability and identity she has known and condemn
her, at pension age, to isolation and trauma in a country that is now
effectively foreign to her.”
“It’s
very hard to think of the future,” says Maria. “The deportation notice is going
round my head all day long. It’s all such a terrible shock. Who needs that at
my age? How can you enjoy life, not knowing what’s coming next? The Home Office
has taken my passport and every two weeks I have to go and report at a Home
Office reporting centre where I never know if I will be arrested and locked up
in an immigration detention centre or allowed to return home.
“If the
Home Office sends me back to the Netherlands, I would not be able to cope.
Everything that I have that is worth staying alive for is here in the United
Kingdom.”
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