A British couple who spent almost £200,000 on their dream second home in France have described being forced to sell it because strict Brexit visa rules made it too difficult for them to keep.
Evelyne Heeley, 77, from Shropshire, said that when she and her husband, Brian, first went to see the house in the Occitanie region of southern France back in 2004, “we fell in love with it straight away”.
They paid €230,000 (£197,000) for the property in the picturesque commune of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val, paying about €3,000 (£2,574) every year in taxes, and around €5,000 (£4,290) for bills and maintenance.
“We’ve had a love affair with France for many years,” Ms Heeley, a former school improvement adviser and headteacher, told i.
The family spent much of spring, summer and autumn at the house, reaching a yearly average of 140 days.
But after the UK left the EU, new rules meant that British citizens without a visa could only stay in a Schengen country for 90 days over an 180-day period.
While France offers a long-term stay visa, Ms Heeley, who voted to Remain in the 2016 referendum, said visiting the country became increasingly difficult, involving a lengthy process of applying for a visa, then collecting it from one of France’s three visa application centres in the UK: London, Manchester and Edinburgh.
She added that passport checks at border control became more onerous, and whereas they once passed through without issues, after Brexit they now needed their documents stamped each time.
Ms Heeley also pointed to the risk of being banned from any member of the Schengen area if one overstayed their visa-free period in an EU country.
“To think that people who have overstayed for a day – say their car’s broken down or they’ve had to go into hospital or something like that – and they’ve contravened this [90-day limit],” she said. “They can end up banned for three years from their home, which they’ve paid for and they pay taxes on.
“It’s crazy,” she added. “And so we decided in the end that it was too much hassle and we sold, and it sold on the day we put it up for sale.”
Ms Heeley says she misses her life in France “terribly” as she and her husband had made “many, many friends” in the area. “We weren’t tourists – we were part-time residents,” she said.
The couple occasionally goes back to visit the town, “but we no longer feel like a part-time resident, we feel more like a tourist,” Ms Heeley said. “I think I just didn’t feel quite the same, that was the problem. In a way I felt that we were sort of alienated.”
‘Shattered dream’
Politicians in France have argued for relaxing the 90-day visa requirement for British second home-owners, saying they have been “punished by Brexit”.
Steven Jolly, 67, a battlefield guide from Huddersfield in West Yorkshire who owns a home in Normandy, has been spearheading a ‘France Visa Free’ campaign for British second home-owners to get the automatic right to stay for six months without a visa.
Mr Jolly described the difficulty of getting to a face-to-face appointment for a visa application, which in his case is a 150km-drive to Manchester and back, twice, once for the application and once to collect.
He said the process, which has a fee of about £100 per visa, required him to produce numerous documents “to prove I wouldn’t be a burden on the French state”, during which he was left without his passport for three weeks.
He said buying a home in France had been his retirement dream. “We bought a semi-derelict cottage in Normandy and we spent the last 10 years turning that into a home with a garden,” he said. “It’s our little bit of paradise; it’s my happy place. I can go and sit there and read and talk to my French neighbours. We have become good friends.”
But he felt his dream of being able to come and go as he pleased had been “taken away and shattered by Brexit”. Now he has to continuously calculate how many days he has spent in France. Mr Jolly said: “It’s taken away any spontaneity.”
“In the end it was British incompetence and poor negotiations that led to this outcome,” Mr Jolly said, adding the campaign seeks to right the “unfairness of mobility arrangements”.
Last month the French Senate backed an amendment to the country’s Immigration Law, which would give British second homeowners the automatic right to a long-stay visa.
The amendment will be debated to be debated by the Assemblée nationale députés (similar to MPs in the British parliament) later this month.
After spotting an opening last year when France was discussing changes to its immigration rules, Mr Jolly scrambled to get as many fellow second homeowners possible to write to their local representatives in France, asking them to drop the visa requirement.
Mr Jolly said the French politicians in support of the amendment saw “the logic in our case” becaues they realised the French were also “being penalised” by the post-Brexit rules.
“They had seen in Covid the effect that the absence that the British visitor was having on their areas,” he said. “They acknowledge that, yes, you make a contribution to French life, you pay taxes, you involve yourselves in French community… You’re more than just a holidaymaker.”
i has contacted the UK Foreign Office.