The Home Office’s refusal to waive the £2,404 fee for the “bereaved partner concession” that grants a widow or widower indefinite leave to remain is a cruel blow on top of a tragic event (Home Office charging bereaved partners £2,400 for leave to remain in UK, 15 May). It illustrates the hardship and pain described in our new report, Destroying Hopes, Dreams and Lives, which details how the extortionate cost of all visas, and the often labyrinthine complexity of the visa application process, affects almost every aspect of the lives of hundreds of thousands of migrants in the UK.
It is unconscionable that we welcome migrants because we need their skills, services and enterprise and then impose extortionate fees – amounting to five to 10 times the actual cost of a visa – that have a destructive impact on their lives.
Nazek Ramadan
Director, Migrant Voice
• A month after a whistleblower working on the Homes for Ukraine scheme highlighted its many flaws and said it appeared to be designed to fail, the process is little improved. Seven weeks since applying for visas for a mother and her two children under the scheme, three weeks since the first two visas were successfully granted, and two weeks since the remaining application was marked for “fast-tracking” by the visa helpline, the family we are hoping to host are still waiting for the last child’s application to be decided.
The odds seemed to be stacked against them. No one involved in the drafting of the application is allowed to speak to anyone in the Home Office who has access to the application forms to identify the cause for the delay. And no one on the visa helpline has any access to the applications or any visibility of the process itself.
All they can recommend is to “speak to your MP”. When one’s MP has a record of consistently voting for stricter asylum rules, and a poor record of responding to emails or to messages left on his parliamentary voicemail, this doesn’t seem to bode well for the innocent child victims of war.
Rachel Shaw
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire
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