The disconnect between services in the UK citizenship process
The UK citizenship process forces you to interact with the UK Government and a third-party service. The disconnect between these two services makes for a frustrating experience for applicants.
How the UK citizenship application process works
There are a few ways you can apply for UK citizenship. When I speak about the citizenship process, I’ll be referring to how I applied, which is as someone who had indefinite leave to remain (ILR) for at least a year.
The UK citizenship process forces you to interact with the Home Office and a third-party service, called UKVCAS, which is run by the consulting company Sopra Steria.
I started by completing the application form on the GOV.UK site. After submitting it, I then needed to interact with UKVAS to:
- upload and submit supporting documents for my application (like my passport)
- attend an in-person appointment to get my fingerprints and photo taken (called biometrics)
I followed this same process for my indefinite leave to remain application, so I was not totally unfamiliar with how it worked.
But I was struck by just how disjointed the guidance for the UK citizenship process was in preparing you for the UKVCAS side of the process.
In this post, I share two of the disfluencies I encountered, which make the process more confusing and frustrating than it has to be.
The impression that biometrics are free when they are not
This was true of my visa applications, too — the Home Office fails at communicating the costs involved in an application. And they especially fail at giving an idea of the fees charged by UKVCAS.
On the GOV.UK guidance pages for citizenship, there was a heading for ‘how much it costs’. Underneath, it said:
It costs £1,330 to apply.
You’ll also need to have your biometric information (fingerprints and a photo) taken — there’s no fee for this. You’ll be told how to do this after you’ve applied.
The key thing here is claiming there is no fee for biometrics. I was (mistakenly) pleasantly surprised when I first read this, because I knew UKVCAS are notorious for charging ludicrous fees for biometrics appointments. I thought this sentence meant that they couldn’t charge me a fee for an appointment.
Wrong.
When I got access to UKVCAS after applying and tried to find an appointment, they all came at a price. Although they advertise that free appointments are available, I did not see any for their Edinburgh or Glasgow branches. The cheapest I saw advertised was for £132.
I was so dispirited seeing I might have to pay an extra £100+ to complete the process after just paying £1,330.
The appointment literally takes 10 minutes. £132, while less than I was expecting from the financially exploitative UKVCAS, is a ridiculous price to charge for what the appointment involves.
You press your fingers on a screen, get a picture taken, and sign your name. That’s it.
It’s a process that used to be done for free at the Post Office before the Sopra Steria contract started.
It was only a few days after applying that I realised what the GOV.UK page was referring to.
What it really meant was UKVI (UK Visas and Immigration) doesn’t charge a fee for biometrics. For example, I had to pay an extra £19.20 to UKVI for biometrics in my indefinite leave to remain application. This is separate from what UKVCAS charge.
It absolutely grinds me how misleading the statement on the GOV.UK site is. It only takes into account the UKVI side of the process. But that’s not the full user journey applicants go on.
To some extent, I’m not surprised by this. As I already said, this was my experience in visa applications, too.
But the text around biometrics fees for citizenship is so deceiving because it says something is free, but does not specify that there’s only no charge to the UKVI. The third-party company actually carrying out the process charges an extortionate amount of money for it.
When I couldn’t see a free appointment listed, I contacted UKVCAS about whether I could use their IDV app. This is an app I was able to use during my ILR app — if you had given biometrics before, they would just reuse your fingerprints and get you to use the app to take an updated photo of yourself.
No fee, no in-person appointment. I had used it before; I figured I could be eligible for it again.
Once again, wrong.
I emailed UKVCAS about whether I could use the app as I had done so before. Their reply was “you are not eligible for use of the IDV App on this occasion”. No explanation as to why. Just that I wasn’t eligible.
I immediately looked at the in-person appointments again, feeling angry that I was going to have to pay a ridiculous fee. I kept scrolling through dates until I miraculously saw a free appointment a month away.
I hated that a month away would mean delaying receiving a decision on my application, but as this was a citizenship app and not a visa one, I reasoned it was worth the wait rather than forking up more money.
Hiding how to prepare your documents until after you apply
The UKVI side of the process tells you what documents you need to apply, but it doesn’t tell you how to prepare them. You only get this info after you submit your application and create a UKVCAS account to use their service to upload documents.
Scanning documents takes a long time. I remember spending 6 hours doing this for my ILR application. My goal was to prepare documents ahead of time so I could send them soon after applying.
Even though I had been through this process with UKVCAS once before two years prior, I forgot all about their specifications for how documents should be prepared.
Without any guidance prior to submitting my application, I made the assumption, as I now remember doing with my ILR app, that scans of documents should be in color and the highest resolution you can get.
After all, you used to send your passport away for UKVI apps. I couldn’t imagine them accepting anything less than the most perfect quality.
Turns out, this is not the case. They set specific instructions for:
- how to name files: You could use hyphens but not full stops, so bank-statement-apr-2018 was okay, but not bank.statement.apr.2018. I didn’t use full stops when naming my files originally, thankfully, but it’s a pretty common way to name files that would have taken a long time to change had I done so (I was sending over around 50 files).
- the size of files: Each document could be no more than 6MB, but you could upload as many docs as needed. When scanning my passport prior to applying, I tried to scan all the pages into 1 doc (it seemed more logical to send 1 doc rather than multiple). My scanner ended up separating my passport scans out into 7 docs, but even these ended up being way over the 6MB size limit. I already had scans of my passport from my last application, so this was the only reason that prevented me from rescanning every single page again. (I did have to rescan the pages that had been since stamped, though.)
Because of the size limit, they also recommended scanning in black and white. After scanning everything in color, I couldn’t imagine going through everything to do it in black and white again. But as it wasn’t a requirement and I met the size requirements, I just went ahead with the color scans.
Point being with all of this, applicants should be told all this info before we submit our application. Even the full citizenship application guidance says, “ensure you have the correct documents before you apply”.
We’re told to gather our documents before applying. We should be told what format they should be in to avoid any duplication of effort.
Moreover, for anyone who needs to book a biometrics appointment as soon as possible after they apply, it’s especially important that they know how to prepare their docs ahead of time. Otherwise, they’ll be rushing to get this done before their appointment when they could have carefully prepared well beforehand.
It’s one user journey — treat it that way
As an immigrant completely jaded by this system, my mind jumps to thinking that this disconnect is intentional. As I often shout about, this system likes to hurt people.
But as a content designer, I also recognize this as a poor practice not unique to the Home Office and common in large organizations: siloed thinking that is not considering the whole user journey.
Immigrants don’t interact with the Home Office, and then interact with UKVCAS. We follow a set of steps to apply for citizenship.
We shouldn’t care about who is doing what in the process. We should be presented with clear guidance about what we need to do, when we need to know it.
I have no hope for the Home Office to fix this disconnect. I just need to vent about how awful the process is.
But if you’re someone who works in my field or industry reading this, take the time to reflect on the disconnected experiences you might be providing users and how you can work to fix them.
My UK citizenship experience blog posts
This is my second post in a series about my experience applying for UK citizenship.
Read the other post in this series:
All text from the Government referenced in this post was as it was written at the time I was interacting with this content in November 2022.
I’ll be releasing the next post in May.
