Hello,
My wife was granted ILR today at croydon premium service center, and I thought I'd share our experience as might be useful to others:
.Our appointment was at 12:20, we arrived around 12:00.
.We parked just opposite the center at the NPC car park. There's a round about 200 meters after the center which you can use to get on the other side of the street.
.We passed security, the guys were super friendly, not a stressful experience at all. Especially that our 2 kids were with us.
. Upstairs at reception they check your payment, passport, spouse passport and quick look over your form.
. Somehow our form was out of date, it mentions on the left side of the 1st page that the form is a 2017 version. She checked with a supervisor who mentioned we need to fill in a more recent version of the form.
. They printed it out for us at reception and asked us to fill it in (all 59 pages) in the cafe/waiting area, then return to reception.
. Half way filling in the form, the lady from reception found us and gave us a few pages that were missing from what she had printed for us.
. The form unfortunately or fortunately was exactly the same (as far as I can tell), so I'm not sure what the point of this was, but the staff were helpful and I was able to copy all the answers once I made sure the questions were the same.
. We finished filling in the form and headed back to reception at around 1:30.
. They give you a number which is used to track your application's progress.
. At around 2:30 we were called to hand in our form and documents.
. All paper clips, notes, dividers and sleeves were removed and the documents were put into 1 pile. When I asked why, they mentioned that it'll make it easier to photo copy all the documents this way.
. I told them we have photo copied some of the docs, and then these were added to the pile of documents.
. This was one of the points I was stressing about, whether the docs need to be photo copied or not. Apparently they will photo copy the docs they need.
. Straight after we went to the biometric waiting area, this step was quick.
. Then the long wait started.
. 3 hours later, at around 6:30pm, our number was called to pick up our documents and receive the decision.
. The application was approved and new biometric resident card will arrive at home address within 10 days.
Areas in the application I was worried about:
- I left the photo copying too late, and wasn't sure how important this was. So didn't have enough time to photo copy everything.
- In the section where you list all absences from the UK, the form only has 4 entries that can be filled, we needed 6. So I wrote the last 2 underneath the table provided. I'm not sure if that was the best way to deal with that situation.
- My salary changed within the last 6 months, but always exceeded the minimum. So I entered the lower amount as my current salary. The employer's letter clarified both salaries and when the change happened.
Everyone we dealt with was really friendly. And quite helpful. For some reason I was mistakenly expecting the opposite.
There's a small children's area with a TV and 1 toy. The TV is turned off at 4pm!
I'm glad we had so many snacks for the kids.
Many screens in the waiting area showing which stage your application is in.
I'm still not sure how I downloaded an out of date form.
This was our full experience, but in no way
Best of luck to everyone applying. And thanks for everyone's answers and input on this forum, this was extremely helpful.
Sherif
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