Is Britain open for business?
Earlier this week the UK’s Immigration Minister, Damian Green, appeared before the British parliament’s Home Affairs Committee to answer questions about queues at passport control in Heathrow Airport.
Simultaneously, the European Tour Operators Association (ETOA) released a statement pointing out that the problems created by UK Border Agency at Heathrow, while bad for Britain’s image and economically damaging, should be viewed in the wider context of the problems caused by issuing visas.
Research conducted by ETOA reveals that hundreds of millions of pounds are lost to the UK economy every year because the visa process is so alienating that applicants give up and decide to go elsewhere.
- The UK tourist visa costs £78, which currently offers two countries: the UK and, courtesy of a recent waiver scheme, Ireland. The Schengen visa costs €60 and offers 26 countries.
- The Schengen visa application form is three pages long; that for the UK is eight pages.
- The UK visa form has to be completed in English. The Chinese do not require their visa forms to be completed in Chinese characters; the Russians do not insist on Cyrillic
- Prospective visitors have to submit fingerprints as well as a photo, make themselves available for an interview at a location that can be hundreds of miles from where they live. They may have to wait for as long as three weeks for a decision
- ETOA’s survey of travel agents and tour operators showed that 26 per cent of Indian and 30 per cent of Chinese clients applying for UK visas gave up rather than endure this time consuming and humiliating application.
- France now attracts over 50 per cent more visitors from India than the UK.
- In 2009, Switzerland joined the Schengen Area. Indian visitor arrivals were at 132,000 in 2008, by 2010 they stood at 197,000; this was growth of 49 per cent. In the same period, the UK numbers rose from 359,000 to 371,000: a growth rate of 3 per cent.
- Since the UK introduced visas for South Africans in 2009, visitor numbers have declined by 24%. In the same year visas were abolished for Taiwanese travelling to the UK. Visitor numbers have since increased by 39 per cent and revenue by 155 per cent.
- Visit Britain’s figures show that just three per cent of Chinese visitors to Europe in 2010 obtained a UK visa, two per cent obtained both UK and Schengen visas and 95 per cent obtained just a Schengen visa
Tom Jenkins, Executive Director of ETOA said: “Images of queues at Heathrow damage the UK; they make the prospect of a visit here tiresome and unattractive. The damage done by this is major, but is short term: it can be fixed quickly. The damage done by our visa regime takes place thousands of miles away, where the clients are, in the origin markets. These markets, such as India, China and Indonesia, are of enormous long term importance to our strategic growth as a destination. They are being lost.
The current government is making efforts to improve the speed and experience of obtaining a UK visa. Given the benefits to jobs and investment, this should have the highest priority.”
Entries (RSS 2.0)
Totally agree that the Visa process is alienating, expensive and very frustrating. We required an ancestry visa to stay long term, from New Zealand.
Assistance from officials is pretty much non existent, we had to pay to call the embassy in Wellington, to have them advise us to use an “agent”, whose charges pretty much quadrupled the $500 fee we each had to pay. This with no guarantee of acceptance – not that you could expect that. The Embassy could not advise us what visa to even apply for, one of us came under the ancestry, the other was a partner – we wanted to know if the partner also applied under ancestry, or something else.
The website was difficult to navigate, with one series of links taking us in circles, without answering the question.
We had to drive several hundred kilometres to the only centre in the South Island that took your fingerprints and photo (just two weeks later that building was destroyed in an earthquake, leaving only two centres in the North Island, Auckland and Wellington as the only options for some considerable time).
We then had to send an 8 page application, with supporting documentation (including ALL passports issued in the past 10 years) to a mail centre in Auckland. From there the application was sent to a processing centre in Canberra, since closed and transferred to the Phillipines!).
It was not a simple process, nor did we feel welcome in the application process. When we applied the website stated we had to enter the country within 90 days of issue, but we also had to allow 6 weeks for processing. That meant a lot of careful planning to avoid stuffing up that side of it, also we couldn’t take advantage to low cost deals until we knew we had approval).
When the visa was approved we noticed that we could not enter the UK WITHIN 90 days of issue, so that meant interim plans had to be changed (fortunately was not too much of a problem for us)
Our experience at airports (we have been back and forth from the UK several times since arriving a year ago), has always been positive… apart from the long, long distances to walk from the aircraft to immigration. We have been fortunate not to have to spend hours in the queue, staff have been pleasant and welcoming.