What’s gone wrong at the Home Office (‘Inhumane’ Homes for Ukraine scheme requests security scans for baby girl, 24 April)? On 22 February, we submitted an application for a visa for my wife’s 15-year-old daughter, Lisa, to come to the UK from Ukraine as the child of a parent settled in the UK. Two days later, Russian forces invaded Ukraine. On 26 February, we arranged for Lisa to travel on her own to Warsaw, where my wife, Zoriana, flew out to meet her. They submitted her biometrics in Warsaw on 28 February, and later that week I managed to get her case escalated as urgent.
Since then we’ve been advised that we should abandon our application and apply for a visa under the new Ukraine family scheme. However, the advice on the long-term implications differs depending on who you talk to.
We did get an email four weeks ago asking us to pay the immigration health surcharge and to check our junk mailbox for a link to pay this. If we didn’t receive the link (we didn’t), we were to let them know by sending a message to the “document upload” email address and they would “urgently” resend it. We immediately did this, and have repeated this three times, each time receiving confirmation of receipt. Since then we have heard nothing, and we fear that our application has disappeared into a black hole. All the phone lines steer you through hundreds of options, all ending with a voice message. We cannot speak to anyone.
I decided to send a complaint using the online form. This is where frustration turned into despair; after filling in all the relevant details including the applicant’s name, passport number and date of birth – a message came up: “Applicants must be over 18 to complain.”
Lee Kneller
London
• We are hoping to sponsor a Ukrainian family, but we have become tied up in needless bureaucracy. The family – a mother and two boys aged three and 10 – are still in Ukraine. They had a sponsor and received their visas weeks ago, but unfortunately the original sponsor had to pull out. We stepped in as new sponsors. After many attempts, we managed to speak to the immigration helpline and were informed that the family would need to apply for new visas to reflect the new sponsor.
We are doing everything we can to help this family. They are stuck in Ukraine, even though they have visas. Surely it should be simple to get our police and home checks done and simply update the visa data to reflect the change of sponsor? We have applied for new visas, but the system is not at all transparent and we are fully expecting something to go wrong, as they will be confused by this second visa application.
The government needs to fix this shambles now. Lives are at stake.
Michael and Linda Holmshaw
Devizes, Wiltshire
• I am trying to get visas for three Ukrainians from Kharkiv who fled to the Czech Republic after their flat was bombed. They are a woman, her mother and her son. The application was made at the end of March, and apart from an acknowledgment that TLS Contact, the application processing firm, had received the applications, I have heard nothing. Our experience has been frustrating and depressing. How common is this? We cannot get hold of anybody to ask any relevant questions and have no idea how much longer we have to wait, or if there are any problems with the application.
Anne Davies
Durham
