Is there any value in paying for a Priority Visa?

Waiting for a settlement application to be resolved can take as long as 60 working days
(12 weeks). So the UK Visa and Immigration department of the Home Office (UKVI) offers a Priority Visa (PV) scheme. For an additional, non-refundable fee of £551*, applicants are promised an upgraded service which aims to cut waiting time for a standard application by half. But is this extra price worth paying to secure your visa earlier?

Unfortunately, in practice, the answer is no. The UKVI has regularly failed to meet its own target. They even admit that ‘in the past, we have not had consistent timescales for processing PV applications’.

Using data gained under the Freedom of Information Act, we can reveal that 6,470 applicants paid over £3.5 million in additional costs to ‘prioritise’ their settlement visas between 1 October 2016 and 30 September 2017.

But of those, only 803 people received their visa within 15 days or less. On average, it took up to 42 working days (more than eight weeks) to resolve those PVs, even though applicants had paid to be ‘at the front of the queue’.

Admittedly, some PV applications are not as straightforward as others. However, given the sizeable cost of this service, which is in addition to the visa application fee, the UKVI needs to be more accurate about its PV processing times. A family of four may think twice about forking out an extra £2,204 in PV fees if they knew that their cases would still take at least eight weeks to process.

A recently published internal UKVI document has set out the Home Office’s strategy towards offering consistent timescales for processing PV applications during 2018. While the document highlights the importance about being ‘clear with customers about what they are paying for and what they can expect from us’, this ambition will only be achieved if the Home Office becomes more transparent about its actual visa processing times.

Until then, customers have little choice but to pay extra for a service that can’t be delivered on time.

*The cost of using the Priority Visa service for a visit, work or study application (‘non-settlement’) is £184. UKVI aims to make a decision on a ‘non-settlement’ Priority Visa application within five working days of receiving an applicant’s biometric information.