After Wai-Liang received temporary leave to remain in the UK, he finally got a permanent job and has been doing very well. However, the temporary leave expired in April 2004. If he wanted to stay after that, he'd have to still be my partner and he'd have to apply for what the UK terms "Indefinite Leave to Remain".
We decided early on that we wanted to make the application in person. The 9-month wait we endured (click here in case you arrived here from somewhere else) without our passports was just too much to take.
We originally were going to travel to Lunar House in Croydon. This is the main southeast England/London centre for the Immigration and Nationality Department. However, it is always overcrowded, and you must turn up at an ungodly hour like 4 am in order to ensure that you are even seen. There are no guarantees that you will be seen or that, if seen, your application will be decided on a same-day basis.
Thus, we decided to go to another IND Public Enquiry Centre to make our application. The nearest other office was in Solihull, just south of Birmingham. So, we put our application together and decided to go there in person to file it.
Filing SET(M) is not as much of a hassle as filing the first application for temporary leave. It asks you to demonstrate whether you are still in the relationship, whether you can provide for each other without recourse to public funds, and it asks for a fee. If you post it to the IND, it's £150. If you want the same-day face-to-face service, it's £250. We chose the second. They want to see pay stubs to demonstrate that you're solvent and earning income, and they want to see evidence that you're living together, such as mail addressed to you both or each of you separately at the same address. They want two passport-sized pictures of the partner who is making the application, and one of you. They want your passports.
We put the whole thing together in document folders and bound them in the same binder we used for the first application (tempting fate, I suppose...)
We decided to go up to Solihull the day before, stay in a hotel, and then drop by the office for our 9am appointment. We had called the IND office there two weeks previous, and had been offered a 9 am appointment. So we met at Marylebone station, got on our train, and 2-1/2 hours later, got to Solihull. It was a bitterly cold night, and in the interval between calling the taxi company and getting the cab, I began to shiver violently. Luckily, we got to the hotel before I shivered myself apart. The meal was very good in the restaurant at the hotel, and we turned in.
Of course, none of these things goes right when you need it to. It snowed that night, and we discovered that the reason we were so cold was that the window behind the curtain was open. The snowy parking lot greeted us as we dressed for breakfast and check-out. We decided to take another cab to the IND office, but of course the cabs were all being used because of the snow. When the cab finally arrived at the hotel, the driver (a local) didn't know where Station Road was. We arrived at the IND office 20 minutes late. It is a very small building that obviously only deals with the walk-up "customers".
There is a small metal detector in the office, and they give you a ticket after they've ensured you're not carrying anything lethal into the waiting area. We were seen about 1/2 hour after we arrived. We went to the interview area, where the officer is sitting behind a glass screen in a booth. We gave her our application, and included the letter that the Home Office sent with the first application, saying that Wai-Liang's leave ran out on March 24, 2004. The officer looked at it, then at Wai-Liang's passport, and said, "I'm dreadfully sorry and I must apologise. The letter has quoted the date wrong: your leave expires on April 24, 2004, not March 24. The computer won't let me take your application today; you'll have to return within 4 weeks of April 24.
We were not happy, of course. We spent about £300 on the hotel and train tickets, and had nothing to show for it. But, mindful of an acquaintance who was filing the same application at Lunar House and who had gone ballistic when he was told the application could not be dealt with on the spot, we simply thanked the officer and left. And, you guessed it, when we got to the station we had just missed a train and had to wait about an hour. I really felt awful for Wai-Liang, who's been waiting for this for 5 years.
We made sure the application was up to date and called the office two weeks before we wanted to visit (March 29 was the original date we envisioned). When I got through, the officer said that because of staff shortages, they were only making appointments one week before the appointment date.
I called again on March 22, and it took 1/2 hour to get through! The recording asking me to "press 1 for x, press 2 for y" just returned again and again. Finally, after much dialling, I got a living human who said that all appointments for the 29th and 30th were taken. I made one for 9:40 am on March 31.
This time, we decided to make it a day trip. We got up a 5am, got to Marylebone by 6, didn't have time to get breakfast as none of the breakfast places were open yet, and got a 6:30 train to Birmingham, stopping at every sheep and cow pat between London and Birmingham. There was also no refreshment trolley on this train, and it was bitterly cold as someone had forgotten to turn on the heat. By the time we got to Solihull I was again shivering and very hungry. We ate breakfast at the station and walked to the IND. The routine was the same except, oddly enough, this time they took my phone off me as it is a cameraphone. I had the same camera in February but they didn't take it from me. Go figure.
We had the exact same officer (who was an "officer in training"), and she did finally remember us. She looked at the application, made a few tick marks on it, flipped through the evidence folders but did not actually take any of the papers out, just glanced at them, and then said with a smile, "We can do this for you today." We went to the cashier and paid our £250, then returned to her and she told us to wait for about an hour. One and one-half hours later, we had the Indefinite Leave to Remain page in Wai-Liang's passport and the letter formally confirming that he can stay here as my partner as long as he doesn't leave Britain for more than 2 years at a time. Eureka!
We got back home and went out to a Thai restaurant to celebrate. We found a lovely new restaurant, the Thai Pavilion East, just opposite the Imperial War Museum. It was a perfect end to a long, hard struggle that put lots of pressure on both of us. So what better way to celebrate than an Asian restaurant!
If you want to file your application in person with the Immigration and Nationality Department, you may now do so by making an appointment with any of the IND's offices. Good luck to everyone who wants to ensure that they stay here with their partner!
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