alsanober wrote: ↑Fri Jan 04, 2019 12:50 pm
AnotherUUID wrote: ↑Fri Jan 04, 2019 12:38 pm
My general rule of thumb, as confirmed by a Nationality Enquiries rep, is if you have any doubts whether you should disclose something or not, then the safest option would be to do so. If they find it irrelevant, they simply won't consider it. And if it's relevant then you will have disclosed it anyway.
Though in my case I also tend to get application anxiety when it comes to such important applications, which often doesn't help in remembering things that I would deem completely unimportant (like parking tickets). So I had to send two further correspondence letters after having sent the application to make sure I have disclosed everything...
So better play it safe than sorry. Retrospectively, I should have done a SAR as well, so thumbs up for doing this yourself!
Paid parking tickets? you disclosed that as well. I had one last year when i parked where the curb was dropped and i was literally 3 inches away from safety but still got ticked and paid on same day. Shall i mentioned that in application?
Thanks
For the parking ticket I would say, since you remember having it, you should declare it.
@DocKnow, this is not entirely true. As I mentioned earlier, Section 3 on Good Character Requirement of
Guide AN (December 2018) explicitly states that fixed penalties
including parking tickets
must be disclosed, even though they would not usually be taken into account unless they have made it to court or it shows a pattern contradicting the "good character".
If you genuinely cannot remember (I mean, for silly parking offences how often does one actually do?), then I would personally say that you cannot really disclose anything you haven't remembered and the application still holds true that "to the best of your knowledge" the information you have provided is true and correct.
Yet it's still up to the caseworker to decide. The caseworker guidelines do mention that they should also take an overall picture of the applicant and not cling onto specific actions of the applicant (unless otherwise instructed for certain actions). I totally agree with you and I too had genuinely forgotten about the two PCNs I had received and paid the same day, to the point where I had to go through 10y of bank statements to figure out the dates. But now that I remembered, I presumed it would not hurt to follow up and disclose them. This way, hopefully, they won't go against the GCR as opposed to the caseworker having found out about them and them not having been declared.
I agree that the application form, especially the online one, has very little space for one to include such details especially if you have to cover the circumstances around them. But that's the whole point of providing a covering letter.
Frankly, I am not a big fan of the way GCR is considered as some clauses are so vague that almost anything seemingly unimportant that one had genuinely forgotten about could be considered as "use of deception". But I have faith that the caseworkers are people just like us and try to make the best of what they can with the applications at hand. In that line of thoughts, some PCN due to silly parking really shouldn't (at least morally) affect an otherwise good application, disclosed or not.
