The home office has announced that effective from today 1st June, it will now cost £5.48 to enquire about your visa application if you live outside the UK.
A scenario may be, you have made an application and it is taking sometime to hear back from the home office aso you wish to get in touch with them. You will need to pay £5.48 – to get progress of your application.
This fee covers all email exchanges per enquiry – so all conversation on the subject matter of the progress of your application, for example, will be £5.48. However, you may then want to enquire on another matter, e.g, changes to your application – then it may cost £5.48 for this ‘new’ enquiry.
Nearly 3 million visa applications in the year up to March 2017 according to the Office of National Statistics, hence the Home Office, in an attempt to cut costs, outsourced this service to Sitel UK.
They have also reduced the number of languages from 20 to just 8 – English, Arabic, Cantonese, French, Hindu, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish, with no change to the £1.37p cost per minute to call the enquiry service.
These are not applicable to visa applicants within the UK and to online visa applications itself (these have fees attached to them). Click here to learn more about the customer enquiry service changes or here to contact the UK Visas and Immigration.