These documents included: all our passports, original marriage certificate, all our original birth certificates, my MOTHER'S original birth certificate, my GRANDFATHER'S original long-form birth certificate, bank & utility statements, original work contracts - EVERYTHING.
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By the time we came to send this all off in late November 2015, my husband had a job offer back in Australia, so we planned to leave the UK in April - we only need the visas extended for the next five months. So we send our stuff off, and we wait. And wait. And wait.
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We can see from our bank statements that the UK visa authority has taken the £2000-odd pounds processing fee from us, but we're into 2016 and haven't heard anything - until, in late January, we get a letter telling us that our application and all our documents have been lost.
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Specifically: having received our application at their first processing centre, the visa authority took our money, made NO OTHER RECORD OF OUR APPLICATION, and then send our docs on to their other centre, via the REGULAR-ASS UNPROTECTED MAIL SERVICE, whose post depot flooded.
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Ours was not the only application thus affected. In fact, we were later told by the Australian consulate, fuckups of this nature are *common* to the UK visa authority, who are apparently known for being careless with documents, slow, & generally incompetent by other governments.
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So: we need new passports in order to leave the country. But to get new passports, we need new supporting documentation. And all those documents WERE ALSO LOST. And me? My passport is my only photo ID. So we had to get my mother IN AUSTRALIA to get a new birth cert for me.
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We then had to organise, and pay out of pocket for, a two-day trip to London (where the consulate is) FROM ABERDEEN, to get new passports in an expedited, not-reliant-on-the-Royal-Mail fashion. Which, again, cost us about £2000 out of pocket. It KILLED our savings.
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In the end, the UK visa authority refunded us for the application they couldn't process, and returned our "lost" documents (which evidently weren't destroyed by water after all) to us. But by then, it was late in 2016, almost a full year after we'd applied, and we were in Aus.
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We never recovered or were compensated for the additional £2000 we lost having to sort things out, and because of THEIR ERROR, the UK visa authority now flags all our passports whenever we enter the UK, because for some reason, they need a re-explanation of what happened.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
AAAAAARGH7I CAN'T FREAKING BELIEVE THIS!!! They do this on purpose I SWEAR
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