Back to square one with my step kids applications.

[gabwyn]

Hi,

I'm a British citizen and my wife is Tanzanian, we've been having a very difficult time dealing with the wall of bureaucracy and incompetence that has been put in the way of our family being together.

After a year and a half since first applying for my step kids settlement visas and finding countless problems with our documents being mislaid, or being verified against some unknown appellants information, we had our case withdrawn by the home office presenting officer due to errors from their side.

We have subsequently discovered that they have yet again refused the applications (through our MP as we still haven't received notification ourselves) so we're back to the beginning.

We've decided at long last to get a solicitor involved but we've had very different quotes, from £1000 up to over £3500, we were wondering what the going rates are and why the huge difference; what service and effort will the solicitors at the top end of the scale give us compared to the lower end.

We welcome any advice or any stories from folk in a similar situation.

Thanks

[MPH80]

You might be better off, once you know the reasons for refusal, in posting them here first and seeing what the collective knowledge is.

It would be unusual for UKBA to withdraw and then refuse on the same reasons - so they must have found something else.

I doubt any solicitor can give you any kind of accurate quote without know the refusal reasons.

[gabwyn]

Thanks MPH80,

We were given an idea of the reason from the MP's correspondence section to our local MP but first maybe I should give a (very long-winded) timeline of events:

Our initial application in December 2012 failed due to lack of certain important documents (including the death certificate for my step sons father and a letter from my step daughters biological father consenting for her to travel) so we submitted an appeal through the Immigration and Tribunal Service and sent off the required documents in February 2013. Their customer services confirmed receipt of these documents in mid-February and that the documents were to be sent to the Entry Clearance Officer in Nairobi for verification.

The “complete” set of documents were sent to the entry clearance officer in Nairobi in March 2013. The entry clearance officer in Nairobi again refused the application for the sole reason that he hadn’t received the 2 documents mentioned earlier. We appealed once more because the documentation had been sent.

A date for the hearing was arranged for late September 2013. After receiving the court date we started to track down the missing documents. After numerous telephone calls, emails and faxes the death certificate alone was found by the tribunal service and sent back to us but the letter from my stepdaughters father consenting for her to live with us had been lost. We contacted her father and he sent another notarised letter to us confirming that he was giving his consent for her to live with us.

Two days before the hearing a representative from the home office phoned asking about any extra documents we would be presenting at the hearing. When I mentioned the 2 documents they were not even aware of their existence so, as requested, we faxed all the relevant documents to the Presenting Officers Unit in September and prepared ourselves for the court day, shortly after this they adjourned the hearing until November 2013.

Three days before the new hearing the home office phoned again to say that the faxes they had received weren’t enough and we were now responsible for sending the original documents to Nairobi so we sent them via DHL and the hearing was adjourned yet again until January 2014.

We went to the court in January to hear that the Immigration Judge was ill so our appeal was adjourned again until the end of January, however when in the court waiting room we received a new Refusal of Entry Clearance document for my stepson based on the findings of a document verification report. Enclosed with the refusal document were copies of emails and faxes sent between the British High Commission in Dar es Salaam and their counterparts in Nairobi which show that the entry for my stepson had been substituted for a Ugandan lady who was also applying for a visa to enter the UK. The Document Verification Report regarding the death certificate for my stepsons father was verified as non-genuine because it turned out that they thought that the death certificate for my stepsons father was supposed to be a birth certificate for a Ugandan woman who was also applying for a UK visa. When the details didn’t match up they classified it as non-genuine (they even pointed out that the Entry Numbers and document types weren’t the same between the two sets of information in the email printouts attached to the report and rather than checking up on this discrepancy they proceeded to change the entry numbers and headings to match).

I sent a letter of complaint and on the basis of this the case was withdrawn.

The MPs correspondence section informed my MPs office that a new decision has been made and the original document verification report was attached to the wrong appellants information after the document had been verified but we have an audit trail that was supplied with the DVR that clearly indicates that the mix-up occurred before the verification and that they were comparing 2 different sets of data from 2 different cases.

The letter sent to our MP also indicated that they now didn't believe that we were responsible for my stepdaughters schooling or providing financial assistance despite the bank statements/transfers and school receipts indicating the contrary, and despite the previous entry clearance manager review indicating that this wasn't a problem.

[Obie]

I believe you should wait for the refusal, get a direct access barrister to defend the case at the tribunal, and probably save cost of going through a solicitor.