Home AffairsLetter from Sarah Rapson, Interim Director General, UK Visas and Immigration Section, to the Chair of the Committee, 12 July 2013
Thank you for your letter of 25 June regarding visa refusal notices and your feedback. I will ensure that your comments are passed on to the Entry Clearance Officer concerned.
The new Family Migration Rules and the inclusion of specified evidence provides a focus for entry clearance officers in the assessment of the application, where these elements are not met, they will clearly set this out in refusal notices, tailoring their observations to the application in hand. This has highlighted the benefits of focusing on the evidence submitted and has provided an opportunity for us to improve the content and language used to convey these decisions more broadly.
Although visitor rules do not include specified documents or evidence and rely on an assessment of the application in credibility terms, you will be pleased to know that we have recently reviewed the way in which entry clearance officers present refusal decisions, focusing more on the evidence that has been provided by the customer, rather than what is not available to the decision maker.
As a result our refusal notices are more personalised and explain more clearly why the evidence submitted and the applicant’s individual circumstances do not satisfy the requirements of the immigration rules.
Training in the revised approach will be delivered to all new entry clearance staff pre-posting from July 2013 and will rolled out across all entry clearance posts by December 2013.
I am also pleased to tell you that following your feedback and other comments, we are currently doing some work to analyse a cohort of “in-country” refusals of leave to remain with the intention of producing some advice for customers on the most frequent reasons for refusal. I am keen that we quickly demonstrate our commitment to creating a culture of customer satisfaction in UK Visas and Immigration and I agree with you that this would make a significant difference to those who apply to us and are refused. This advice will be relevant not only to those who have been refused who may wish to re-apply but also to those applying for leave to remain in the first instance, helping them to ensure any application addresses all the points it needs do.