UK immigration clearing visa application backlog in Pakistan

November 12 2009 by Liam Clifford

Backlog in visa applications will be cleared says UK immigration minister.

The Islamabad UK visa office is slowly clearing a backlog of 7,000 applications after the UK immigration minister promised to respond to concerns about delays.

In the past five weeks, 4,000 appeals cases have been dealt with, consisting mainly of UK visa applications under the settlement and family visitor categories. The UK Home Office has deployed extra staff to the British High Commission in Islamabad and in Abu Dhabi to help get the operations running smoothly once more.

UK immigration minister Phil Woolas says that at the beginning of September, there were 7,000 visa applications waiting for consideration, a number which has reduced to 1,500. He says this backlog is expected to be completely eliminated by the middle of this month.

Despite the concerns about delays, particularly to the appeals process when UK visas are rejected, Woolas said stringent new checks on applications will not be compromised. He stated, “we will not cut corners in our checks as we clear this backlog and we keep the levels of checks under review to ensure we are responding adequately to the current level of threat. This will have an impact on the speed with which are able to work, as will the current security situation and the IT platform on which are operating.”

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