Tier 5 BRP will be With Home Office When We Return to UK

[kovacsma]

Hello all,

My partner (unmarried) and I submitted our QP and EEA-EFM visas recently (this question isn't about these applications) using the European Passport Return Service. On submission, my partner had to give her Tier 5 BRP to the office officials because they said they don't do copies of that travel document like they do passports... That's silly, because the whole reason we bothered to pay the premium to use that service was so we could retain the document we need for travel! Plus, the application documents heavily laid on the suggestive text, pointing us to that service. But I digress...

My partner holds a Canadian passport and we kept the documents that say she had to submit her BRP for this EEA application. We have travel booked to the EU during the application consideration period -- booked mch earlier, as we expected to be able to keep the BRP. Our return travel is the concern. The returns will be via Gare du Nord (Eurostar) and then via Gatwick. Both returns are well within the applicable time period of the Tier 5 Youth Mobility Visa.

I was able to call Gatwick's border force office who assured me that because she had a Canadian passport, there wouldn't be any problems until she got to the border guard at Gatwick (i.e. she would be able to board the plane). Then we could explain why she doesn't have her BRP on her, and we'd be taken aside while they went to the computer system and looked up the BRP data, and allowed her to complete her biometric evaluations (i.e. finger printing). Thoughts on this? Surely this is similar to the situation where someone has the BRP stolen or accidentally left elsewhere when they return to the UK -- albeit someone whose passport would not otherwise restrict them from travelling to the UK without a visa.

I haven't been able to contact any office related to the Eurostar border control offices, and in fact I don't quite know where that happens -- is it on the Paris-side or the St Pancras side? Any thoughts on the situation here?

[kovacsma]

My girlfriend's Tier 5 BRP will be in the Home Office's hands when we return via Gare Du Nord in early April. One one hand, you can scold us for planning travel while applying for new visa/residence rights, but in our defence, the Home Office's/Visa & Immigration's communication re: the use of the Passport Return service was misleading -- her and I were applying and we qualified to use the Passport Return Service (with payment of a premium charge, as opposed to submitting our travel docs for 6 monhts), but apparently they won't copy your BRP as part of that -- and they make no apologies for making that unclear... Anyways...

On return via Gare Du Nord, we're trying to find out what the policy is if someone goes to security and says, "Please, I have a BRP, it's not lost or stolen, it's with the Home Office; please check your records, here's proof it's with the Home Office, please look up my file and run the biometrics".
The Border Force at Gatwick (through which we are also travelling, later this summer) has informed us that their policy would be to pull you aside for a few minutes while they did exactly as I described/hope for at Gare Du Nord...

Looking for the relevant policy docs on the Immigration and Border Control website, but no luck. Surely the policy cannot be so harsh if someone were to forget their BRP in the UK when they left for a trip, as to say "F*** you, you're going to go through hell to get back in the country and it's going to be DAYS of waiting wherever you currently are, and hundreds of pounds to get a temp BRP"...

[vinny]

See also BRP lost experience.