As of March 2024, the government began rolling out a new electronic visa scheme.
The objective of this scheme was to reduce the risk of document loss for those with physical immigration documents. The government planned to finish moving people onto electronic documentation before the new year but as it stands 1 million people are without E-Visa documentation. The government intend to allow late application but this still leaves a large amount of people without reliable documentation.
This poses a serious risk to human rights protection since people without documentation will not be able to prove their Right to Work, Leave to Remain and Recourse to Public Funds. Currently, this is handled by the Biometric Residence Permit (BRP) however the move to the E-Visa is designed to make them obsolete.
From October, I began personally working with the Refugee education training and advice scheme (RETAS) for my dissertation and I have seen first-hand the difficulties refugees have faced with their application to the E-Visa scheme.
There has been many complaints that employers are refusing to recognise the electronic documentation. This is largely down to the fact the scheme itself has been poorly communicated by the government, with a common issue being users of the service aren't exactly sure what an E-Visa allows them to do and not to do.
For me as a native English speaker, I find also the language used by the system is unnecessarily dense and difficult with little focus put on the actions the claimant needs to carry out. Often for people whom English is not their primary language, they have shown up at the RETAS centre looking for help and also sought the help of charities to assist them in this process. A frustrating occurrence as well is that many people believe they have set up the E-Visa only for it to turn out they have just received an email with the link to confirm that their provided email they intend on using.
Even for those refugees who have set up their E-Visa, there are still problems with their status, face photo or other elements of the documentation showing up incorrectly or not at all. All this coincides to create a chaotic situation where people are deprived of benefits, employment and sometimes even the right to remain because of the processes' flaws.
Perhaps, what is most damning is the fact that the system doesn't actually let you ditch the physical documents. In order to keep access to a E-Visa account people still need to retain the physical documents used to create it, or at least memorise either the 11 digit number on their BRP or there passport ID number. This leaves refugees still vulnerable to document confiscation, making the entire scheme to move towards electronic documentation seemingly counterproductive.
Overall, the government's E-Visa scheme has been a disaster and we can only hope the home office at least sees fit to extend the application period to sort out this mess!
This Blog Post was written by Charlie Aldous.
Edited by Lisa Bennett.
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