Woman wins Home Office battle to stay in the UK - but her fight continues against legal loophole

For more than three years, Canadian Heather Ducharme has worked at The Body Shop’s headquarters in Littlehampton as an international sustainable sourcing manager, travelling the world to do business with small communities from Mexico to Rwanda.

In September 2019, Heather, who was then living in Windward Close, Littlehampton, applied to remain in the country indefinitely because she has been living in the UK continuously for a decade.

But the Home Office rejected her application because it included the travel she had to make for work, pushing her over the threshold to be eligible. It left her with a stark choice earlier this year: spending thousands of pounds on a lawyer to challenge the decision, or leaving her long-term partner Wendy and moving to Canada with her then-six-year-old son Will in the depths of the first national lockdown.

She chose the first option, and after several months of uncertainty during an already stressful year she was granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK.

It left the 46-year-old with mixed emotions.

She said: “I can’t say I felt overwhelmingly happy about it, because I shouldn’t have had to go through what I went through in the first place.

“For me and everyone around me, it means I don’t have so much insecurity – but it took far too much time, money and uncertainty, and it will take a long time to get over that.”

Heather has since moved to Rutland in the East Midlands to live with Wendy, and has been lobbying her MP Alicia Kearns to get the rules changed so immigrants who work abroad as part of their UK-based jobs are not penalised. She has asked Alicia to speak to Home Secretary Priti Patel about the issue.

This comes as Heather was recently made a trustee for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, (JCWI) which she joined during her battle to stay.

She said: “I’m not as vulnerable as some people dealing with the Home Office; I had a nice country to go home to.

“There is no point me being angry about my experience forever. There has to be something positive I can do with it and this was it.”

For more information about the JCWI and its festive appeal, visit jcwi.org.uk.