Passport issues - how long did a Right To Remain application actually take?

[ChocolateBiscuitCake]

So sorry - this is not an AIBU but not sure the travel section gets much traffic!

My nanny applied in august for a right to remain visa/passport and had to send in all her current travel docs etc. £950 taken from her bank account.

She is due to fly home at the beginning of January and the Home Office will not tell her where they are with her application. She can however, request her valid passport back again but forfeit her £950.

I am totally disgusted as she is essentially imprisoned in this country (but that is another thread).

I spoke to them today and they WILL NOT commit to ANY timescale as to how long the process will take - 3 months? 6 months? a year? If you have applied for this type of visa, please could you kindly give us hope that the application will be processed shortly. How long did yours take?

Thanks so much

Well hindsight is a wonderful thing but really if she had travel plans, she should have used the premium service which is very much worth the extra for peace of mind. You need to bear in mind that it is ILR that gives most of the rights and so it is the application that is taken the most seriously after the initial entry visa - citizenship is actually a slam dunk in comparison.

www.ukresident.com/forums is excellent for immigration advice - we got a lot of support there when DH was applying for his first UK visa (from the exceptionall useless Canberra High Commission) and his leave to remain application once in the UK and have just had help there again in connection with his citizenship application and the current citizenship waiting times.

Not that it matters to the OP, but I remain sceptical that the checking service for indefinite leave to remain was available before 2010. The Home Office website says that it was launched in Oct 2010 and that the previous service was available for citizenship applications, not ILTR applications:
www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/newsarticles/2010/oct/13-scs-launch

It's true that the situation is as bad or worse in other countries (what my DH and I have experienced at the hands of the UK immigration authorities pales in comparison to the horrors we went through with US Homeland Security). But that doesn't make the huge delays, and the inability even to find out what is happening with an application, justifiable or right. Decide whether someone is allowed to stay or go, fine, but don't leave them in limbo for an indefinite amount of time.

To the person who said that non-EU immigration is 'hardly a priority' - fine, but the delays can also have a huge impact on UK citizens who have non-citizen spouses or partners.

I think that spousal applications are adjudicated pretty quickly.

My DH's ILR was adjudicated in 2 hours and his citizenship about three weeks.

Marfisa - the service was definitely available in 2009. It was called priority something and you had to make an appointment to go to an office in Croydon. I'm not saying I agree with their priorities obviously, I'm a spouse whose marriage was seriously strained by the stress of it all. But politically - nobody cares. Non eu immigrants can't vote after all.

pisses me off though that they charge so much and then take so long. They don't do that in any other area of government that I know of - but they know they have immigrants over a barrel and it looks good in the Daily Mail.

We paid for the premium service (around £1300, but worth it if you want/need to travel and dont want the stress of waiting), took all docs into Croydon and had ILR in less than a day. Easier and safer than sending all your docs away.

Visa status remains the same if you do use the send away service if the visa expires before you get your docs back. There is also the option of the doc checking service so you can send paperwork but not docs.

Not that all this helps, but I agree that flights should not have be booked that needed a passport if there was ANY chance that they wouldnt be back in time. (highly likely as advice given to us was when we started the process was that it could take up to 6 -12 months, which is why we knew about the visa status).

The immigrationuk site mentioned above is fabulous help. It helped us with a checklist of everything we needed to make sure my initial visa and subsequently ILR paperwork would be processed and not passed back and forth asking for everything). FWIW, my initial visa app to get into the UK was quoted as a 12 week wait and we got that in 24 hrs as well. I vredit this to having everything they could possibly ask for in the folder labelled and indexed and copies of it all for both them and us. Saves time and hassle. DEFINITELY go to that site.

Non eu immigrants can't vote after all.

some of them can!! I always voted, even when I was just here as a student.

In fact, non-EU immigrants are more likely to be able to vote in parliamentary elections than EU immigrants. I could vote as I was a citizen of a commonwealth country, whereas friends who were citizens of various European countries could not (in parliamentary elections; they could vote in local ones, and in European ones).

OK, I'm convinced about the documents check service having existed for ages! I guess I didn't want to believe it because oh, the heartache we could have avoided...

Even before the document checking service, you could take your documents to one of the offices around the country and do the ILR in person. We went to Loony House in Croydon and spent less than half a day there. It was a case of handing in the documents and returning 2 hours later for the stamp.

I think you can't do it if your case is in some way complicated though. Mine needed all sorts of letters (my MP got involved in the end), extra documentation, etc etc. A checking service woudln't have been able to help, as they'd not have known what extra evidence would be convincing enough. Or maybe I'm in denial too, after the years of stress waiting for months on end each year for this decision that would turn my life upside down if it'd gone the wrong way.

Just a warning for people reading this who may have been confused by what has been said about the document checking service.

If you were to use this service so that you can retain your passport, it would be extremely unadvisable to travel if your current visa has expired. If you tried to return to the UK before UKBA had processed your application, you would not be allowed back in, even if you could provide proof of the application being submitted.

OP I would also suggest writing to UKBA instead of calling, to find out what's going on. I know it sounds crazy in the 21st century, but I could never get anyone on the phone when I called, but when I wrote to get an update I would always get a letter back within a week with some information.

I had to wait 8 months for my visa as the spouse of an EU national. This was despite the fact that under EU law they are required to process these kinds of applications within 6 months, and I had no complications with my application. They really don't care about deadlines.

I also dispute it's always like this in other countries. The French don't keep your passport, apparently they don't want the responsibility of holding onto thousands and thousands of passports. Quite right!

I agree, Thistledew.

Seriously? She just has to wait and cannot make plans to travel anywhere until she gets her documentation back. Its that simple.

The joys of being an immigrant, Fabby.

I don't think fabby was being sympathetic!

Good point, Thistledew. Once your visa has expired, you can't leave the country regardless of whether or not you are in possession of your passport. Otherwise you won't get back in.

That happened to us too, MorningPurples. They asked us for more "evidence" and we had to scrounge around for extra documents that they hadn't originally asked for, get people to write letters on our behalf, etc, etc. The whole saga just dragged on and on. They wanted us to produce tenancy agreements and utility bills going back years that had our joint names on. Well, if you are coming over from another country to join your spouse, and your spouse is already living in the country, it may not occur to you to ring up your landlord and the gas company and so on and ask them to add your name to everything along with your spouse's. So we thought our case was simple but it wasn't. Thank heaven our lovely lovely MP Evan Harris finally managed to get the HO to process our application and return the passports.

The people who managed to get their ILTR without hassle are lucky IMO, because it doesn't work out that way for everyone.

at Fabby. Here's hoping you never have a family member or loved one stranded somewhere and unable to travel.

My DH has been through the visa application stage twice in this country.

When he was applying for his spousal visa it took about 5 months and we had to forfeit a trip back to his country as we didn't have his passport (or mine!)

We have just applied for his indefinite leave to remain and was told that if we did it by post they aim to complete 95% in 6 months.

We decided to pay £1,300 and went for an appointment with a Public Enquiries Office and they processed it in about 2 hours!
Worth every penny. It is a nightmare waiting for it to come through.

We've been through spousal immigration several times for the USA and UK. We were pretty lucky in the pre-internet days that it just seemed to work out.

Nowadays, everyone has access to very useful forums that give excellent descriptions of real people's experiences and tips for making the process easier.

One of those tips is to make sure that you do second-guess their evidence requirements for a 'real relationship' and co-mingled finances. It really does mean having your fiance or new spouse added onto deeds, utility bills etc, right from the start. It makes it a lot easier to prove that you have a bona fide marriage. The rules are really quite different for couples involved in spousal immigration because you really do not have the option to have independent finances, separate bank accounts etc.

I think we were pretty lucky because we started off from scratch as a young married couple - we had both just graduated from uni so had no property, money and we starting brand new jobs. It is a lot different when the UK spouse is already established.

Obviously, this has nothing to do with the OP and her nanny, LOL.

I think the fees are outrageous -- especially when you have to wait so long!

I don't think they can represent the true costs. My EU visa was actually free (sorry!) so I'm sure all the costs of processing those are transferred onto the UK visas, which is really unfair.

The French visa I got this year was I think 300 euros, which seems about right (expensive but not extortionate).

The EU visa may have been free to you, but others will be picking up the costs.

An EU family unity visa is, by treaty, either free or low cost to the beneficiary (can't remember which), but it does cost a lot more to issue it. The cost will be picked up by the type of people who are posting on this thread.

The priority service has existed for years under various names, but hindsight is a wonderful thing and the OPs nanny didn't use it.

Sadly you can't leave the country whilst your application is being processed and unfortunately the department that deals with ILR applications have been snowed under recently due to the legacy asylum cases. Were your nanny to come into my office and speak to me, I'm afraid my advice would be that she is going to have to cancel her travel plans and wait for her application to be decided and her original documents returned to her.

Far better to do that than to waste the £950, especially if that sum is a huge amount to her.

Yes that's my point (and why I said sorry!)

I think it's really unfair UK applicants and their spouses have to pay more and generally go through a lot more hassle than EU applicants. Obviously I benefitted from this, but I don't think it's fair at all.

I'm not sure they cost more to issue though. There is very little evidence required so a lot less documentation for them to go through and verify.

dreaming is spot on. EU applications cost far less because fewer checks have to be made, less evidence has to be provided and fewer documents need to be submitted.

The EU family unity visas cost less because there is treaty dictating this. There are still ID and criminal checks, and determining that you are in a bona fide family unit.

There will be some reliance on any settlement visa that brought the foreign spouse into the EU, although not all couples will be in this category.