Article 1 – Delays in the Immigration System

One of the main areas of enquiries we are seeing at the moment is applicants worried about delays in receiving decisions on their applications. These issues are not just being seen by OTB Legal’s clients, they are widespread. ILPA (the Immigration Law Practitioner’s Association) recently published an open letter, signed by more than 150 Immigration Law firms, criticising the Home Office for the scale of the delays to applications.

To help applicants understand what is happening, plan for the future, and tackle existing delays we have prepared a three part series of articles covering everything we know and are doing about the current situation.

Today’s article sets out what we know about the current delays. Where we are seeing particular issues, and the difference between the published Home Office timescales and the actual wait times we are hearing about.

Tomorrow’s article will cover the legal implications of delays for applicants and how these delays should affect your timing and strategy when making a submission.

Our final article will provide practical steps and resources you can use if your applications gets delayed.

Priority and Super-Priority service

Much of this article concerns delays in the immigration system generally, but there is a special point to mention regarding the two priority services available to applicants.

The priority and super-priority services are additional options for applicants to receive a faster decision on their applications. The services cost £500 for a decision within five working days and £800 for a decision within the next working day respectively.

Due to the delays in the standard service, many applicants have begun opting for these paid services to try and circumvent the issues others are seeing.

However, on work and study routes specifically, we have also seen increasing delays to these services. Some of our clients have found themselves in positions where they have paid for the priority service but not received a decision for as many as six or seven weeks. In these circumstances there has been no communication from the Home Office as to what has caused the delay and no response when attempts have been made to contact them or escalate the case.

As a result we are generally recommending clients to avoid the priority and super-priority services unless there are exceptional reasons to use them.

There may be factors specific to your case that mean you still wish to go forward with the priority service application. If this is the case we would recommend speaking with an advisor before proceeding so that you can have a clear assessment of the risks involved.

Personal and family visa delays

What the Personal Immigration team say:

“In general, decisions are being made by the Home Office consistently with the published service standards. Regrettably though, the service standard on family based entry clearance applications has moved from 3 months to 6 months, and priority services have been suspended. This is causing considerable disruption to families whilst they wait to be reunited. Decision times on Private life and parent applications made within the UK are also taking a very considerable 11 months on average to be processed, although there is the option of using the Super Priority Service for these applications if that can be afforded. Naturalisation applications are very variable in decision making times. Whilst most are decided promptly within approximately 2 – 3 months, others are taking years to be decided”

*Average

Work and study visa delays

What the Business Immigration team say:

“The biggest issue we are facing is radical inconsistency in the wait times for our clients. In some cases we receive decisions in a matter of days, in others it takes months to get a response. Below we have tried to remove the outliers and provide average wait times. However for certain, less common, applications the wait times are so inconsistent that we have provided the full range of wait times that we have seen.”