UK Starts Pilot Project to reduce processing time for UK Residency Applications
United Kingdom, 20th December: UK Pilots one-day immigration application scheme in a latest move. This is expected to cut UK residency applications waiting period to weeks from few months at present.
UK cuts residency application waiting period—UK pilots one-day immigration application scheme. This is being done to reduce the residency application waiting time to weeks from months. This will help in dealing with a backlog of EU citizens.
EU citizens can look forward to reduced UK Permanent Residency application waiting time now.
The UK Home Office has been planning a new application process for cutting waiting times to weeks for some EU citizens wanting UK permanent residency.
The scheme, which includes a new online application form, has been rolled out to nearly 20 firms in the summer. It has been already expanded to include some individuals along with their families recently.
Related Read- UK Visa Options for Non EU Citizens
Quicker application process to meet increasing backlog of EU national applicants for UK Residency—It may be worth mentioning that quicker application process is aimed at meeting the increased backlog of EU national applicants for UK residency. More and more EU nationals are applying for UK residency due to Brexit voting in June next year.
So, under the new scheme, a handful of corporate clients are included in the trial. Families will now be able to check in their passports for a day to make application for UK residency. That’s something great indeed.
Before the new scheme, applicants were required to physically hand over the passports for a period of up to six months. This limited their ability to travel for work or for personal reasons. The new scheme for ‘online check-in’ of passports will allow individuals to check in passports for their entire family.
This step is also in response to the allegations that the residency systems in other EU nations are more user-friendly than the UK and less designed to catch out undocumented immigrants. It was estimated that the current processing system might had taken nearly 47 years for the Home Office to deal with UK residency applications for all EU citizens in the UK.
There are nearly 3.5 million EU nationals in the UK and they feel uncertainty about their fate in the UK. The UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd informed that these EU nationals will require some form of documentation to stay in the UK after Brexit. However, no other details were available.
UK Home Office has stated that the new pilot scheme is a small test and a part of the modernization program introduced before the Brexit referendum.