to be pissed off at how much I am paying the Home Office!!

[MichKit]

Sorry, just a rant. Am off to get naturalised as a British citizen tomorrow and its costing me £750 for me + £460 for DD. Already paid the Home Office £200 for original visa, £255 to extend student visa, £450 for dependent visa, £750 for permanent residency, all in the past 7 years. And after this I will have to pay more for a passport.

Have paid through the nose on taxes, have not been claiming ANY benefits (including child, though I should now!).

AIBU to be feeling taken advantage of? Especially when a friend who works for the HO told me that teh actual admin costs to do all these visas are minimal?

YANBU. I think the fees are ridiculous, especially for visa applications. My American friend just had her ILR granted but it took them 6 months to return her passport - WTF were they doing with it? It's just the same in other countries though, at least it was in the US.

Fiance visas are only for 6 months and people on those can use the NHS.

People on tourist visas, however, cannot.

YANBU. I'm pretty sure I paid nothing for my ILR, and I don't think I paid much for my citizenship either - this was all within the last 15 years so the increase in rates has been astronomic.

I think the reason for the huge hike in fees is to make the whole visa/immigration/borders agency thingy self funding. So you are not just paying for the divvy to stamp your papers, you are paying for the upkeep of the building, heating, lighting etc.

So that the cost doesn't fall to the UK tax payer...

but that is not true MrsSchadenfreude. The charges are also funding detention centres for asylum seekers and many other things that have as much to do with the service users (who will be UK taxpayers as well) as they do with you.

The cost of a passport is now up to £77.50, and that's intended to finance not just the passport and staffing costs, but also the government's ID card scheme.

£820 is far, far more than the applications actually cost to process.

It's another form of tax in effect.

So proposed changes to ILR in 2011 don't apply top those of us who already have ILR now?

I was going to become a citizen in 2006, but the £700 fee put me off. Then I lost all my paperwork for the Life-In-UK test (that I passed years ago). My 'pass' has probably expired, anyway, sigh.

It takes MONTHS to get an appt. for the test, anyway, which I have no time or reliable childcare to get to it, anyway.

Nightmare.

The fees suck, especially because the costs have hiked up hugely in the last 6 years. It used to be free to get Right to Abode stamped in DC foreign passports because they are British anyway (saved me the price of applying for UK passports), and free to have ILR transferred from expired into new foreign passport: FREE!!! Now it's £72 for each bit of simple admin. It makes me want to grind my teeth, but I guess we didn't know how lucky we were, before (SIGH).

lljkk, its now £150 to transfer the ILR stamp to a new passport, and £500 to do it on the same day. More hikes.

Australians can use the NHS on arrival on any visa, because we have a reciprocal arrangement with the UK and Medicare.

We have ancestry visas and are not entitled to access public funds. Which is fine.

I agree with expat it is a bit of a like it or lump it situation. The UK didn't ask us to come here, we asked if we could - they said yes but these are the conditions...

StewieGriffinsMom: You do not. It is a scam, especially the same-day fee (which implies you might need to get it done urgently - e.g., for a holiday).

I enquired about this and there is no reason to get it done. The indefinite leave to remain is still valid.

Re: NHS entitlement. Fair enough for EU citizens, but the receptionist at the local surgery was telling one of the people wanting to register whether he had been in the UK for a year, and evidence of this fact.

StewieGriffinsMom, SomeGuy is right, you do not have to transfer the ILR stamp. The only problem obviously is that you will have to cart around both the passports... which I do for my DD as well.

Stapling them together worked for us, so we didn't accidentally not take both, but you may want to ask at border control.

SomeGuy - self funding = cover the costs of everything. Obv they can't charge Asylum seekers Hilton prices for the privilege of being detained in one of their centres, so if UKBA etc is going to be self funding, then that money is going to come from "easy wins" such as naturalisation, ILR, passports etc etc.

And you're right, as far as I'm aware you don't need the ILR stamp transferred to a new passport, you just take the old one along with you. But if (like a friend of mine) you got it a long time ago, and travel a lot, then be prepared for a jobsworth immigration officer, who doesn't want to deal with the man wearing refusal shoes behind you in the queue, to go through your passports with a fine toothcomb, making sure you haven't been out of UK for longer than you.

StewieGriffinsMom, please do go into the saga. I would certainly like some company

StewieGriffithsMum- we love a saga, and you never know, dd1 might be like the poster whose daughter never needed to apply in the first place....