When the UK's Digital Immigration System Can't Tell Identical Twins Apart
Nidia Webb, a woman with settled status (the UK's permanent residency right for non-citizens) who has lived in the country for eight years, was stranded at a Spanish airport after the Home Office's eVisa system linked her digital immigration record to the details of her identical twin sister, preventing her from boarding her return flight. Webb told Politico she was turned away at the departure gate and informed that her settled status could not be properly matched to her identity because it had become entangled with her sister's record in the Home Office's database (The Guardian).
The eVisa system, introduced as part of the government's push to digitise the UK's immigration infrastructure, replaces physical immigration documents with a digital record accessible online. Think of it as the difference between carrying a paper passport stamp and having a cloud-based profile that border officials check electronically. Physical documents have been gradually phased out since 2024, and from 11 March 2026, Home Office travel documents are automatically linked to the holder's UKVI account (gov.uk). The digital transition also extends to visitors: from February 2026, travellers to the UK require advance permission under the Electronic Travel Authorisation scheme (gov.uk).
Webb was told that the confusion between twins' records is a known technical issue within the Home Office system, affecting some sets of identical twins. After she contacted the Home Office by phone, staff promised the problem would be fixed. The confirmation email resolving the issue, however, was sent to her sister rather than to Webb herself (The Guardian).
A Home Office spokesperson said over 10 million people have successfully used eVisas to prove their immigration status, and that in rare cases where errors are identified, the majority are resolved within 24 hours. The spokesperson also indicated that the specific problem Webb encountered had been fixed and that staff would contact her directly (The Guardian).
The case fits a broader pattern of difficulties emerging from the eVisa rollout. In July 2025, the Guardian reported that up to 200,000 people who had lived legally in the UK for decades were at risk of being caught up in a Windrush-style scandal because the Home Office could not reach them to transfer their existing physical immigration documents to the new digital system (The Guardian). Monique Hawkins, acting chief executive of the3million, an immigration campaign group, said the organisation had seen previous cases similar to Webb's and that the incident exposed vulnerabilities in the eVisa system. Hawkins told Politico that the rollout had been rushed, and that people were regularly denied not only boarding but also compensation, as carriers and the Home Office shifted responsibility between each other (The Guardian).
The broader context here is the tension between the Home Office's scale claims and the lived experience of individuals caught in systemic gaps. The figure of 10 million successful eVisa uses is substantial, and a 24-hour resolution benchmark for identified errors is not trivial. But Webb's case illuminates the structural problem that campaign groups have been flagging: when a digital identity system cannot reliably distinguish between two individuals who share biometric similarities, the burden of proof and the cost of disruption falls on the resident, not the state. The fact that confirmation emails land with the wrong sibling, even after a phone resolution, points to data-linkage failures deeper than a one-off misconfiguration.
The parallel Hawkins draws to the Windrush scandal is worth unpacking. In that episode, individuals who had every legal right to reside in the UK were denied employment, housing, and healthcare because the burden of demonstrating status was effectively shifted to them, and the documentation they relied on was not recognised. The eVisa system creates a structurally similar dynamic: legal status exists in a database, but if the linkage between that database and the individual presenting at a departure gate fails, the individual is treated as lacking status until the state corrects its own error. The compensation gap Hawkins describes, where airlines deflect to the Home Office and vice versa, compounds the problem by leaving the affected individual without recourse in real time.
What remains unclear from the available record is how widespread the twin-confusion issue is, whether the fix applied to Webb's case is systemic or individual, and whether the Home Office has audited the broader population of sibling records for similar data-linkage failures. The spokesperson's framing of "rare cases" and "the majority resolved within 24 hours" leaves open the question of how many cases fall outside that majority, and what the resolution timeline looks like for those individuals. For a system that is now the sole gateway to proving the right to enter one's own country of residence, those gaps carry weight.
