Some non-priority this time in 2016 and 2017 were only taking 5 weeks. But now we are seeing a few October just now getting their visas, so maybe this year is abnormally long?
Sheffield has gone from processing visas from about 4 countries in 2013 to about 20-30 countries in January, February and March 2017 (new countries were added each month). They used to only process applications from the US, Canada and a couple of African countries, but now the applications are coming from all over the world.
Last year, priority processing times went from 2-5 days at the beginning of February to about 1 month by the end of February, and 1-2 months from March onwards.
2) Season Q3 (summer) has nearly twice the incoming apps as Q1
That would have been the number processed and decided, not the number of incoming apps, as some would have arrived in previous quarters.
The large difference is due to the increase in the number of countries being processed and also the massive backlogs... some applications submitted in Feb and March weren't processed until the summer. Which meant that the application numbers for Q1 were lower than normal, and for Q3 they were much higher than normal.
