Urgent: Tier 1 Extension 2015 Query

Hi All,

My current Tier 1 Visa expires in April 2015. I have lived in UK from August 2010 till June 2014. However from June 2014 till now (Jan 2015) I had to leave UK to support my parents. The reason for this long absence was that my mother was ill and I had to return to support her. I have the medical reports to substantiate this claim. I am planning to return to UK in Feb and apply for my 2nd Tier 1 visa extension in March. As per my understanding as long as I meet the points (95 points) criteria I should be able to get the extension.

Can anyone confirm this please ?

Also i would complete my 5 years in August 2015 but since I was out of country for continuous 7 months i would need to wait till October 2015 to apply for ILR so that i can split my number of absence between year 2015 and 2014. This way my total number of absence in each year would be less than 180 days .

Can you please advise if I would still be eligible for ILR > I have seen on the forum people mentioning that you cannot be outside UK continuously for more than 180 days even if you split that absence across 2 years. I could not find this anywhere on the UKBA.

I would appreciate if the moderators could confirm as this will help me decide whether to apply for my visa extension.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,
SNS

Dear Moderators,

Can you please provide your inputs ? I would really appreciate any inputs you may have regarding my query.

Thanks,
SNS

Hi,
Since you have one long absence of more than 180 days, your continuous period is reset. For continuous period, you have to meet two things:
1) No single absence of 180 days or more
2) No more than 180 days absence during each of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 years before application.
If your absence was made up of multiple ones totaling 7 months, may be you could've broken into two pieces.

Hope this helps.

If I'm not wrong, even for exceeding 180 days there is a clause for compassionate reasons which can be explained. But, I'm not sure what that term entails to as it is a very loose term and open to interpretation.

Can someone who is more experienced comment on this?

iubus2005 wrote:Hi,
Since you have one long absence of more than 180 days, your continuous period is reset. For continuous period, you have to meet two things:
1) No single absence of 180 days or more
2) No more than 180 days absence during each of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 years before application.
If your absence was made up of multiple ones totaling 7 months, may be you could've broken into two pieces.

Hope this helps.

I have seen on this forum that you can break the 180 days long period of absence into 2 parts such that no absence in any year is > 180 days. So point 2 holds correct where you can break the absence into 2 parts.