Thanks Directive, for linking this revealing article.
It shows that this has been blindly outsourced, without really thinking/understanding/optimizing the full visa-process from A-Z. I wouldn´t be surprised if someone in the UK-government received a palmgrease from Worldbridge/VFS to make this system possible.
As usual, I´m convinced the UK (and their devout Irish "friends") would do better, had they simply included themselves into the Schengen-system:
Dailymail wrote:The Mail on Sunday has learned that the Mayor of Baghdad, the Governor of Baghdad and the Minister of Agriculture were forced to wait more than five days in Amman, Jordan – the location of their nearest WorldBridge office – to get visas to come to Britain to sign a helicopter deal.
But while their applications were being examined by WorldBridge, they decided to travel to France instead and bought six Eurocopters, worth £1.3million each, to use for spraying date palms.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi Minister of Transport, ‘furious at the treatment he had received in Amman when trying to get visas’, also struck a deal with a French firm for the proposed Baghdad Metro – a contract potentially worth billions of pounds.
While not adding millions, my own experience also cost the UK, while giving them no security-advantage whatsoever:
My wife (Lebanese) and me (Belgian) wanted to visit London, while living in Dublin. Although we knew that we can probably get to the UK without problems, we wanted to have a visa just to be sure. The process was so "f****d up", that we gave up and had a lovely weekend in Rome instead. By now my wife is naturalised Belgian (which would allow travelling), but the experience is still sitting within us, so that we just couldn´t care less about London anymore.
Being sure I´m not the only one, I guess the losses from this unnecessary mess are adding up to quite a number. I wish it could be expressed in Pounds & Pence
Another little remark:
Dailymail wrote:Mark Sedwill, head of the UK Border Agency’s international group, says he is proud of the new system.
In a CSC newsletter, he explained: ‘Five years ago, we were operating like most countries do now. If you wanted a visa, the theory was that you went into an embassy, filled in a paper application, handed over the money, did an interview and then supposedly got a verdict.
‘It sounds great in theory, but not in practice – in the [Indian] sub-continent in particular we had queues of several thousand people.’
If you have "queues of several thousand people", it´s because of understaffing and very short opening times. This alone does not justify changing the system completely.
Making the system better would justify changing it, but that did not happen.
