UK Immigration News

With the Olympics in full swing, several athletes on UK visas have applied for asylum. Some of the athletes were set to compete in the games while several others were granted UK visas as part of the Olympic training squad but did not qualify for the final national team. This is in part because athletes are required to meet a minimum score in order to qualify during Olympic trials for the final team. If you do not meet this score during the Olympic trials then you cannot compete on the national team during the Olympic Games.

The UK Border Agency (UKBA) has announced from 17 August they will introduce a mobile biometric clinic at British Council offices in Kuching and Kota Kinabalu to enable visa applicants in East Malaysia to submit applications and provide biometric information.The British High Commission said the service would run once a week on Saturday mornings in Kota Kinabalu and Friday mornings in Kuching between 17 August until the end of September.

The UK Border Agency has introduced a priority visa service in Ghana. The priority visa service is available to UK visa applicants who pay an additional fee to have their visa application placed at the front of the queue.You can apply for a UK visa using this service if you meet the following criteria:

The UK Home Affairs Select Committee has reprimanded the UK Border Agency (UKBA) for its backlog of 276,460 unresolved immigration and asylum cases as being "totally unacceptable". Keith Vaz, chair of the home affairs committee, has now called upon senior officials at UKBA to return bonuses worth £3.5 million, which they received, despite the increasing backlog of cases.

The planned 24-hour strike by UK immigration staff, which had been called for Thursday 26th July, the eve of the London Olympic Games, was called off on Wednesday by the Public and Commercial Services Union less than 48 hours before the Games' opening ceremony. Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS, said that the union had not abandoned the threat of industrial action and that he was now proposing a sustained campaign of industrial action in the autumn if the union's demands were not met.

UK Ambassador to the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, John Tucknott, opened the new UK visa application centre in Kathmandu, Nepal this month."Migration and people to people contact are important strands of the UK-Nepal relationship. Our UK visa operation supports this. It therefore gives me great pleasure to formally open this new visa application centre. One that is bigger, brighter and better for everyone who wishes to apply for a UK visa," Ambassador John Tucknott said.