Originally posted by andypaul@Jul 30 2005, 09:40 PM
Great reading wish i had read earlier Pete.

Now we have filled in the form and gathered all the paperwork its down to the me writing the Supporting letter.
It has been said. that a supporting letter is a good way to introduce your relationship to an Entry Clearance Office who is given the task of interviewing the applicant, we have no evidence of course to tell us just how important this is, but I'm sure it can have a positive effect on establishing the genuiness of the relationship, it gives the ECO some idea as to a time-line perhaps of the relationship between the applicant and sponsor.

This was noted during the interview transcript when the ECO can allude perhaps to the amount of visits the sponsor has made to the applicant, a clear indication that the ECO had read the letter, having said that, I am absolutely convinced that the Oral interview is the key deciding factor in granting a visa.

The Oral Interview is the only time when the ECO gets an opportunity of establishing the balance of probability that the applicant and sponsor are likely to live as man and wife in the UK, my information lately is pushing me more in the direction of the concern that ECO's are mindful that once the visa has been granted the marriage or relationship seems to disintigrate after arrival at a UK port of entry.

This leads me to beleive that they are very suspicious of the motive for the application, they seem to have statistics from the Home Office showing that the amount of applications to get permanent residency after the 2 year point, are not consistent with the number of visa's issued for marriage i.e. 2 year temporary residency visas.

This point was also given to me in a private interview recently with my MP who has visited the Embassy in Manila during his career, he pointed out to me, that his figures from the Home Office show a large number of applicants where marriages have simply disintegrated shortly or after arrival in the UK, at first I was sceptical of this in relation to British-Filipino relationships, however he did assure me that there is a significant amount of visa's which do not progress to full permanent residency with the original sponsor, i.e. the husband.

He then told me that its likely that the not so genuine applicants simply leave their husbands when their intentions are to obtain work to support their families in the Philippines, and then simply dissapear into the system, the system being, they attach themselves to other Filipinos, and find accomodation somwhere, and then work, he also told me some husbands immedeatly inform the home office, and attempt to have the wife's visa removed, and or deported.

That is why he has seen evidence of this, we dont want to make too much out of this, the fact is, the British Overseas Missions are aware of this, and maybe that is a factor that we did not always think about before, it might not mean much to us, but they certainly think it does, so we have to be aware that this factor is very much on the mind of the ECO.

Hope this pont also helps during interview preparations.