Hi all,
I'm up for ILR, and for the extra peace of mind we used the Settlement Checking Service offered by Brent Council at Brent Town Hall. I called on Monday the 15th of August and got an appointment on Wednesday the 17th. (I wouldn't suggest leaving it that late, but we had some last minute travel and needed my passport.)
Brent Town Hall has free parking out front, and there's an ASDA across the road where you can park for 2 hours for free if the town hall lot is full.
I brought:
- 2 passport photos of me
- 1 passport photo of my wife
- My current passport
- My previous passport with my old HSMP visa in it
- My biometric ID card
- SET(M) application
- Correspondence covering the last 2 years of cohabitation (a variety of bank statements, council tax statemens, and water & power bills)
- Life in the UK Test pass certificate
- Marriage certificate
- Divorce decree from my previous marriage
I'm self-employed, so no pay stubs. Instead I brought:
- Last three months bank statements signed & stamped by the bank
- Last UK tax return
We waited maybe 10 minutes before being seen, and it took maybe 30 or 40 minutes to go through all the docs and copy everything. The woman who helped us was very nice and helpful. At the end she gave us receipts for the checking service payment and a "What happens now" checklist with a tracking number for the Royal Mail package with my docs, application and passport.
She said she thought it would take 6 to 8 weeks (maybe a bit ambitious, but a man can dream - haha) to get an answer.
Observations:
1. This may only apply to self-employed people, but when they say "tax return" they don't mean the PDF you get from HMRC when you file online, they mean the statements you get in the mail from HMRC saying how much tax you've paid and how much you owe/they owe you.
2. I only had a copy of my divorce decree, and didn't have enough time to sort out getting an original sent from the US. I decided to use logic (the civil authority who married us checked the divorce decree before marrying us, so therefore we shouldn't need to provide it again) and if that didn't work I was going to hope for the best and see if there'd be a way to get the original and provide it later.
As it turned out, the woman processing our paperwork said, "Is this a copy?" I said, "Yes, we had to give the original to the registrar who married us in Cyprus." "And they didn't give it back?" "No." That seemed good enough for her. She copied and stamped it and gave me back the copy I'd provided.
3. If you don't have some piece of evidence, they'll let you go get it and bring it back later without having to make another appointment or another payment. I know this seems like common sense, but it was still a concern of mine before going in.
As I said in number 1, I'd brought the PDF tax return, but she wanted the HMRC statement. I brought it to her a few hours later, she copied it, stamped it, added it to the package of documents, and gave it back to me. No problem.
And now the wait begins.
