Wow, that took a while to read. I shouldn't have dismissed it out of hand. I thought it was the CAC report, but no, it is an amazing document. If I was not in a Civil Partnership with a man, I would say I have found the new love of my life. Linda M Costelloe Baker is an amazing and insightful woman, with a wonderfully dry sense of humour. Much different then that old pain the CAC.
For those who don't want to wade through the whole thing, the IM essentially monitors visas where there is limited rights of appeal. She mentions quite a bit around 320(7a), which provides for the 10 year ban where the applicaint is deceptive and 320(11) which is the catch all refusal for "previous deception". The notes that because 320(7a), ECOs cannot take lightly the accusation of deception and that in particular complaints need to be dealt with because of this. She mentions that a lot of the in country visa websites often are inaccurate and out of date and this leads to problems. Her dry humor pointed out that many refusal letters have improved dramatically since her last review, with fewer gramatically mistakes, which she states for much more boring reading, but she said the exception was that an ECO stated that Birmingham was 250 miles outside of London when in fact it is only 101.
She provides a case out of Caracas where the applicaint had 4 passports, had applied, based on bio matching as at least 2 other people and had, upon verification, forged visas in his passport. She also noted that there is a 1.3% refusal rate based on biometric verification. Again, a rather shocking statistic.
She also mentions that 100% review of refusals by the ECM are being phased out and that more detailed reviewed of target refusals can dramatically reduce the error rate. It makes sense in that ECMs will simply rubber stamp most refusals if they have to review all of them, especially when some refusal rates under her remit, run into the 50% range (14% globally). She provided some evidence that going for a more detailed review on more targeted cases actually makes a significant impact in accuracy.
Vicky will be glad to find out that some posts won't even send proper bundles to the IM. So it isn't just you Vicky.
At the end of the day, the document is some great insight in how the VSD works, but for the average person, there isn't anything in there except to know that someone who seems to be honest and straightforward and believes the Government has certain responsabilities is looking after refusal where there is limited grounds for appeal.
