A lot of people are asked to redirect their complaint elsewhere or told the issue has been resolved when it hasn\u2019t, only to be \u201cignored for weeks\u201d with no timeline for resolution and forced to seek legal advice, said Victoria Welsh, a co-convenor of the Immigration Law Practitioners Association\u2019s (ILPA) digitalization working group and the head of business immigration at Taylor Rose.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
One automated message from UKVI acknowledging receipt of an error report said the service was \u201ccurrently experiencing a very high volume of enquiries\u201d and as a result would \u201cnot be able to respond within [its] published timeframes,\u201d according to an email dated February 23 seen by POLITICO. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not a charity, we\u2019re here to make money, but it\u2019s not right that people have to instruct lawyers to help solve these problems,\u201d Welsh added. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Andrew Tingley, a partner at Tingley Dalanay and another co-convenor of the ILPA working group, said UKVI often doesn\u2019t accept that the error reported even constitutes an error. \u201cThis calls into question whether the statistics collected are accurate,\u201d he said. \u201cThere does not appear to be any institutional acceptance either by civil servants or ministers of the major issues that people are facing.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
Glitches will inevitably occur with any rollout of a new system, Welsh said. The problem is \u201cthe [Home Office\u2019s] continued denial that there are problems, the continued statements that in the vast majority of cases, everybody\u2019s fine … frankly, it\u2019s gaslighting,\u201d she said. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Serious consequences<\/p>\n
For those who do encounter problems, the consequences can be devastating. \u201cAny scale of problem should be enough to take it more seriously than what is happening … People are losing accommodation. People are being shut out of their bank account. People are being refused entry to the country. They\u2019re being refused boarding on planes,\u201d Welsh said. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A lot of people are asked to redirect their complaint elsewhere or told the issue has been resolved…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":327777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[118097,802,748,118098,2814,3677,30088,7964,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,40,118099,5111,48,87396,1199,7154,53,11587,16,15,6863,5113],"class_list":{"0":"post-327776","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-apsana-begum","9":"tag-brexit","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-citizens-rights","12":"tag-data","13":"tag-digital","14":"tag-digitalization","15":"tag-enforcement","16":"tag-eu","17":"tag-europe","18":"tag-european","19":"tag-european-union","20":"tag-great-britain","21":"tag-immigration","22":"tag-jonathan-oates","23":"tag-parliament","24":"tag-rights","25":"tag-seema-malhotra","26":"tag-services","27":"tag-software","28":"tag-technology","29":"tag-transparency","30":"tag-uk","31":"tag-united-kingdom","32":"tag-visas","33":"tag-yvette-cooper"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114992979896202860","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}