The EU side have published another summary of progress on citizens rights (HERE). This time it's 22 pages, five pages longer than the last one (see HERE) so there has been some progress but there are still outstanding issues. As before, the table attached to the note uses Green for convergence, Red for divergence and Yellow for the items where further clarification is needed.
After the last round at the start of September, there were 39 items where we had reached agreement, now it's only 37 for some reason! Eight items remained to be clarified, now it's 7 and twenty two items were red indicating there was no agreement. This has now got down to just 13 with a further three to be referred to the full EU Council compared to two last time.
I don't want to labour the point but citizens rights were supposed to be among the easiest thing to get settled and here we are still haggling over the details. Looking at the summary one can see the sheer complexity of it all and perhaps it's not surprising that it is taking so long, but it does not bode well for the amount of time we have left for all the hundreds of other things that need to be agreed.
