Moving to the UK?

Thinking of moving to the UK, legally? Then this is essential reading.

I am a British citizen (although I have spent most of my life in South Africa) but my wife is South African born, so this sad (disgraceful?) story is all about our struggles to get her into the UK.

Make no mistake we did our planning starting about ten years ago. But, as I have read about and experienced in the military, the best plans and intel almost always go to pieces on the ground.

To paraphrase a line from a Robert Burns poem (To A Mouse);

The best laid plans of mice and men often go sideways.

And that is undoubtedly the case here.

So, about three years ago I landed at Heathrow planning to find work and get the ball rolling. We knew that I needed to be employed for six months and have an income of around GBP 19,000 per annum.

I arrived a day before then PM Boris Johnson announced the UK’s first Covid lockdown, Sunday 22 March 2020.

Looking back I should have seen that as a sign that I should get on the next plane back to South Africa ASAP.

I was fortunate enough to find work within two months and two months later we were able to sell our house (not so fortunate as you will see later) for what we thought was a tidy profit (about GBP25,000), most of which we planned to move to our new home as a nest egg.

The new owners wanted to move into the house in July so I needed to arrange rental accommodation for my wife. This is also important as you will see shortly.

In November of that year we were finally able to apply for my wife to join me. And this is where it gets ugly.

There are two critical factors here; time and money. They are linked so I will deal with them together.

Here is a summary of the process and the costs (all costs are in GBP):

1. The visa application itself: 1,600
2. Three years of NHS payments upfront: 2,000
3. Cost of legal assistance (essential for the incredibly complex rules): 500
4. The application took 18 months. Yes, Covid was obviously a delaying factor but the Home Offices own website had indicated 3 months (pre Covid) and 6 months at the time of our application. So now I’m paying for my wife to live in South Africa for an unplanned extra 12 months. That cost: 9,000
5. That comes to a total of around 13,000
6. Then, costs that we did not know about. After 3 years in the country she has to reapply for a 2 year extension to remain at a cost of: 2,000
7. Two years after that she has to apply for “Leave to Remain” at a cost of another: 2,000
8. Now the total is up to 17,000

So, nest egg of 25,000 and costs of 17,000.

The end result?

She eventually arrived in the UK in June 2022 and we settled down as best we could.

Once we were notified about the extensions we cut our losses and she went back to SA a couple of months ago.

We have lost our house, our car and our dignity.

Now, I am trying to build something of a nest egg here in the UK and have started a part time online business (a side hustle I think they call it) and hope to be able to go back myself in the next year or so.

Postscript:

I suspect this is a little known and thoroughly demeaning part of the visa application process.

My wife and I have been married for over 40 years. We have 3 children and 4 grandchildren. And yet we had to “prove” that our marriage was “valid”.

How do you do that you are probably wondering?

Well, following our lawyer’s advice I had to get letters from each of my children to verify that we actually were a couple and that we had brought them up together. They were as flabbergasted as we were.

Even the few British friends that we have made shake their heads at this story in disbelief.

Maybe this is, at least partly, the reason why there are so many illegal immigrants?