UK eVisa mix-up with twin left settled resident stranded in Spain

Settled resident blocked at a departure gate

A woman with the legal right to live in the UK was stopped at a Spanish airport and told she could not board her flight home because the Home Office's eVisa system had matched her immigration record to the wrong person — her identical twin sister.

The Guardian reported that Nidia Webb, who has lived in the UK for eight years, discovered the problem only when airline staff refused her at the gate. Her digital settled status had become attached to her sister's details, so the system could not tie her status to her identity.

A known fault, according to officials

Speaking to Politico, Webb said she was told the error was a recognised technical problem that affects some twins in the Home Office's records. Staff promised by phone that it would be corrected, but the confirmation email was then delivered to her sister rather than to her.

She learned the fix had actually gone through only at the moment she was permitted to board. Webb said that without hours of phone calls she has no idea how long she might have been stuck abroad.

What the Home Office says

In a statement, a Home Office spokesperson said more than 10 million people have already used eVisas successfully to demonstrate their immigration status, and that the department remains committed to data accuracy as the digital system expands. Where errors do surface, the spokesperson said, most are put right within 24 hours.

The department added that Webb's specific problem has since been resolved and that staff would reach out to her directly.

Cracks in the wider rollout

The eVisa replaced physical immigration documents as part of the government's post-Brexit push to digitise the UK's immigration system, and it has attracted sustained criticism. The Guardian reported in July 2025 that as many as 200,000 people who had lived legally in the UK for decades risked being caught up in a scandal comparable to Windrush, because the Home Office could not contact them to move their old paper documents onto the new digital platform.

Monique Hawkins, acting chief executive of the immigration campaign group the3million, told Politico that her organisation had handled similar cases before Webb's. She argued that people need a genuinely dependable way to prove their status, called the eVisa rollout rushed, and said the group regularly sees people denied both boarding and compensation while airlines and the Home Office point responsibility at each other.

Why it matters

The case is a compact demonstration of what happens when a paper document is replaced by a single database entry. With a physical visa, the traveller carries the proof; with an eVisa, the proof lives in a government system, and any data-matching error effectively strips the person of status at the exact moment they need it — a departure gate, in front of airline staff who must enforce the government's data.

Edge cases like identical twins are precisely the kind of failure that a rushed migration tends to surface, and Webb's account shows where the burden lands: on the individual, spending hours on international phone calls to correct a record she never broke. If carriers and the Home Office each treat the other as responsible, travellers can be left with no practical remedy at all. For a system that millions of residents must rely on to enter their own home, a "rare" error rate is not a comfort — it is a countdown to the next person stranded at a gate.