The treatment of visa applicants by the British High Commission is terribly demeaning
KARACHI: The treatment of visa applicants by the British High Commission is terribly demeaning. I applied for a visa in July 2015 when the Commission had just started including a health surcharge in addition to the visa fee. Because of a problem with the high commission’s website, which did not directly lead applicants to the health surcharge payment, within days of sending my visa application, the high commission asked me to resubmit my application and pay the visa fee a second time to complete the online application. I was promised that the visa fee would be later refunded. The high commission’s first correspondence had come with a warning of refusing a visa if the additional payment was not paid as soon as possible; but while it was quick to send warnings on account of its own technical problems, nearly six months after I paid again on July 27, my fee has not yet been refunded.
In this time, I have written to the high commission in Islamabad numerous times and contacted the UK Foreign Office, but nobody even cares to respond. For all my emails, I got one acknowledgement in September with an apology for the delay and a note to say that the refund will be looked into “next week”. It’s been four months to the ‘next week’ but nobody has bothered to follow up.
When it comes to submitting applications, there is no room for any mistakes and applications can be rejected for the slightest reasons. There is always a tense silence in visa offices because the process is so intimidating, but when it comes to the performance of the high commission, there is zero accountability. I have paid interest on my credit card for months, only because of the high commission’s callousness. This level of arrogance and poor work ethic is really astounding, that even when the high commission is at fault, it does not care to reply or resolve the matter. Frankly, any Tesco’s in the UK is run more efficiently than this. It also makes one wonder if such treatment is meted out only to Pakistanis or is the British High Commission equally unprofessional in other parts of the world, too.
Zehra Abid
Published in The Express Tribune, January 23rd, 2016.
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