Anybody who has had the misfortune to apply for a UK visa in the last year will have entered the Byzantine domain of the British High Commission visa application process. Complaints about the inefficiency of the system, its impenetrability and virtually universal lack of response to enquiries be they by phone, email, FAX or tied around a rock and thrown over the wall – have become the stuff of dark legend. The matter has been highlighted by a Briton who has his adopted home in Pakistan – and has married a Pakistani. He appears regularly on our TV screens and in print – and went into print in the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’ recently (reprinted here in another English-language newspaper) to relate the tribulations associated with getting a UK visa for his wife.
The story he relates is similar to thousands of others – nobody answers the phone in Abu Dhabi where the visa office is located (yes, Abu Dhabi…security concerns); calling a visa hotline number that is now non-existent; generic ‘Dear Sir/Madam…’ emails from Islamabad or Abu Dhabi – a wall of silence and smothering fluff. The actual business of receiving the applications has been outsourced to a local courier company, who are also responsible for the initial interviewing of applicants and the screening of their applications. Smart new offices dedicated to this activity have been opened by visiting British dignitaries who speak flatulent nonsense about enhanced services, better customer relations and ‘being here to serve’. Today, irate and visa-less Pakistanis berate the local company to whom the work is outsourced – because they are at least visible and staffed by living breathing human beings.
Behind the meaningless and patronising platitudes we are offered in lieu of anything worthwhile there is a monster cock-up. Two years ago the UK re-jigged its immigration controls and agencies. The Border and Immigration Agency, HM Customs and UK Visas were all merged into a single body – the UK Border Agency. Merging agencies as disparate as that was a recipe for disaster; a disaster which has duly befallen this dribbling Frankenstein creature and become a global embarrassment to the UK generally. So far as Pakistan is concerned, the move of the principal decision making regarding visas to Abu Dhabi was made in the light of legitimate security concerns; as well as fears about the pressures that local staff here may come under once the identity of their employer becomes known to their extended family. There may be a backlog of up to 40,000 unprocessed visas in the pipeline. Thousands of students awaiting a visa to join their studies in the UK have seen the start of their semester come and go with no visa in sight – and no way of finding out when it might appear. Memo to UK Border Agency… ‘We are not all terrorists. Why do you treat us like a bunch of criminals? And can we have our passports back? Please.’