More than 500 Permanent Residence Certificate holders are still in limbo, awaiting approval for Bermudian status as Government struggles to work through a backlog of applications.

A judgment last year on the case of Carne and Correia paved the way for PRC holders to gain status under the right circumstances.

Home Affairs Minister Michael Fahy said that Government began processing the applications in September but a Government hiring freeze along with a sudden influx of applications after the judgement was announced last May, has led to delays.

Mr Fahy said that Government may be able to use existing staff to help manage the extra workload.

He told The Royal Gazette: “Obviously there is frustration because people would hope that their applications would be processed much faster.

“The difficulty is that we do have some staffing issues because the numbers of applications are higher than you would see in a regular year. Your normal applications are people who are, say, marrying a Bermudian, or they are a child of a PRC holder who is now eligible. These are the applications we usually deal with. [The PRC judgment] added a significant workload for the department.

“As we have a freeze on new hires, we are doing some internal mechanisms and we will soon be in a position to get at least one other person on the team to be trained as to what they have to look for and hopefully that will make a difference. That will happen in the next four weeks or so.”

Another contributory factor was that many applications had been incorrectly submitted. Mr Fahy explained: “We have had a number of instances, and not an insignificant number either, where people simply haven’t understood the paper work that they are submitting.

“In order to obtain status under this particular section, you need to become naturalised... so it’s important that people remember that they need to submit naturalisation application information as well. That is vetted by us and also vetted and confirmed by the deputy governor’s office.

“Status applications can’t be approved until they are naturalised so it is a two-step process. A lot of people have just filled in their status applications so we had to return a number of applications on that basis. I urge the lawyers out there who are helping out their clients [to take note of the requirements] — they have made mistakes as well, not just the applicants.”

About 620 applications were received in total out of an estimated 1,400 who are eligible, according to Government estimates.

So far, Government has processed around 70 of those applications and 80 have reached the processing stage.

He said that the Department of Immigration was prioritising any applications that may have deadlines looming and encouraged anyone whose time is running out to check in with the Department of Immigration.

“People should be rest assured about the fact we are prioritising those applications where there are time limitations issues. For example where you have an individual whose child is going to be turning 22 years old and their parent doesn’t get status in time — to be eligible for status they need a parent who had status before their 22nd birthday. We are not talking huge numbers of them where we have prioritised those applications.

“We haven’t missed any deadlines but if anyone believes that we have missed someone who may be up against an important deadline then they should bring that to the attention of the Chief Immigration Officer. We are prioritising those applications but we may miss one or two and we don’t want to find ourselves in that position.”