Hi,
I thought I would share our story, and hope that it gives someone some encouragement, particularly those who may be on a low income and are soon thinking about applying for ILR, SET (M). Please excuse the extra length of this post, but we wanted to include everything we thought was relevant.
My wife arrived in the UK in Dec 2009 on a Spouse Visa. Two years has gone by and yesterday we applied for ILR, SET(M) at Croydon PEO, which was GRANTED.
Unfortunately, for various reasons, we have both been unemployed since Feb 2011. Before this, we were both working. I was working full time (Sep 2009 - Feb 2011), and my wife had a part time job (Mar 2010 - Mar 2011) working one day a week. We are currently living in our parents home, rent free, where we have been since June 2011. Between May 2010 - June 2011, we were renting our own flat. This was possible, as for most of this period I was working full time.
I was a little apprehensive about our ILR application. We had about £9000 savings in our account, most of which had been given to us recently by our parents (which was clearly visible on our bank statements) due to profits from the sale of property etc. Up until this time, we were really just "surviving". As mentioned above, when I was working full time, we were able to support ourselves for over a year, and were renting our own place, paying council tax, bills, car insurance etc etc.. although for a lot of this time, we were in our overdraft. Since that time, we have continued to survive (until we received the money from our parents recently), without much money to live in, and only my job seekers allowance as an income.
We arrived at Croydon PEO yesterday to hand over our application.
Once we had our application briefly checked downstairs to make sure it was valid, we were advised to head upstairs, where we then paid the £1350 fee, and took a seat to wait for our number to be called.
Shortly after, our number was called, and off we went up to the booth where the officer was sitting behind a screen.
(I think what follows is the correct order of events). The officer first asked us for our photos, life in the uk test and passports.
He then asked us to provide payslips or bank statements. We explained that we were both unemployed, so he asked us to just provide the last 3 months of bank statements, which we did.
He then asked us to provide proof of co-habitation. We had included a variety of documents in joint names, mainly utility bills, bank statements, tenancy agreement, tax credits letters etc etc. We initially provided to the officer 11 documents with our address on them. These included one document in joint names for each quarter of the year 2010-2011 (the final quarter of 2011 had two documents in our individual names, as we had no joint documents) and also four extra documents in individual names from 2010-2011, which were provided for good measure.
The officer at the PEO advised that he did not require any evidence for the final quarter of 2011 as it was very recent, and handed back to us our two individually named documents from this period. In total, the officer took from us one document in joint names, for each of the seven quarters (2010-2011), and also took from us the four extra documents that we had provided in individual names, 11 documents in total.
We also tried to provided to the officer our marriage certificate and my wife's birth certificate. He wanted none of these documents, advising us that we would have already needed to submit these documents in the past, to have been issued with a spouse visa. Next we gave him evidence that we were living with our parents, in their house. We presented this in the form of a letter written by my parents, stating that we were currently living there with them, in our own room, rent free. We also provided the officer with the land registry documents to show that their house was owned outright. The officer took all of these documents we had provided. He didn't appear that interested in where we were living, or that we were living rent free, and asked us nothing about this at all. In fact, it was us who offered to present him with this evidence. However.. maybe he was planning to ask us about our accommodation, if we hadn't already given him our accommodation documents.
The officer then went away to photocopy all of our documents. He returned a few minutes later and told us that everything was in order and we had been granted ILR.
I then proceeded to ask him whether he thought that our application was a "straightforward one", due to the fact that that we were both unemployed, although we had savings. He replied that our application was straightforward. He also said that all our documents we had provided were good ones, and that he had dealt with many other applications which were not so good and straightforward.
The officer said that even if we had zero savings, that as long as there was some money coming into the account, he would approve the application and grant the ILR. He stated that for example: "(paraphrased): even if someone was receiving millions into their bank account, they could still be in their overdraft etc" which is why he would not refuse an application based on finances.
It seemed that he was not concerned at all with the finances, when deciding on a set (m) application, and that even someone on an extremely low income, should have no problem being granted ILR, as long as their documents are all in order.
After this conversation with the officer, we were told to wait for my wife's passport to be issued with the visa, which could take up to an hour. Shortly after this, our number was called again, and my wife was given her passport, with ILR inside.
We arrived at the Croydon PEO at 13:30, for a 14:00 appointment. When we left the building, with the visa in our hands, the time was about 15:15. So it all happened quite quickly for us. There were not many people in the building with lots of empty blue seats.
Hope this helps someone.
Thanks,
Andy
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