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My wife has applied for Permanent residence, she is Russian. We have been married for 7 years, and lived in UK since Jan 2005. We lived in Germany before that.
When we moved back to UK, my wife did so on a visa issued to an EEA family member, as I had not exercised my treaty rights in UK.
She has now applied for Permanent residence, and we were advised the correct route is EEA4.
However, our EEA4 has been returned due to insufficient information.
We apparently using the Surinder Singh ruling (I have never heard of this before) and when I called the HO, they asked for comprehensive proof that we worked in another EEA member state for 5 years.
Does anyone know why this is relevant ? My wife didn't work in Germany, I did, and the only remaining documentation I have are our residence permits, which I have been told are insufficient. It will be extremely difficult to retrospectively obtain any other documentation 6 years on !

Has your wife never applied for a Residence Document (or Residence Card as it is called since 1 May 2006)?

Anyway, UKBA is totally wrong to require that you worked in another member state for 5 years.

In order that you can invoke the rights under Directive 2004/38 you (mark400) need to have lived and worked in another member state for a reasonable amount of time (but a few months should be sufficient). When you come back into the UK (as you did in Jan 2005) your family members (i.e. your wife in this case) have the right to accompany you and to live and work in the UK without restrictions and regardless of their nationality.

Now you are applying for Permanent Residence in the UK, and the requirement is that you have lived in the UK according the EEA Immigration Regulations for five years (you could have applied already in January 2010 therefore). Basically, if you have worked during these years and made no recourse to public funds, it should be OK

If you have been accepted on the EEA route already five years ago why does the UKBA feel the need to re-check that fact again? What evidence did you include in the application for the permit in 2005?

The German residence permits alone may indeed not be sufficient enough (some member states are known to be quite 'sloppy' with EEA documentations though I very much doubt the Germans are). You must be able to show that your activity in German was 'effective and genuine' in the sense of EEA regulations.

mark400 wrote:When we moved back to UK, my wife did so on a visa issued to an EEA family member, as I had not exercised my treaty rights in UK.

The last bit doesn't make any sense to me.

The Surinder Singh ruling was a judgment of the European Court of Justice although the most recent one relevant to you is the Eind case.