Spouse visa approved after an earlier refusal

• Refused for missing evidence
• Rebuilt and resubmitted the application
• Visa granted first time on resubmission

The situation

Our clients were a married couple. The husband was a British citizen living in Manchester and working as a self employed electrician. His wife was living abroad and had applied for a spouse visa to join him.

They had made the first application themselves. It was refused because the Home Office was not satisfied that the financial requirement had been met. The husband earned enough, but the rules for self employed income require specific documents covering a specific period, and several of them had not been included. The refusal letter accepted that the marriage was genuine.

The couple had been apart for almost a year by the time they contacted us. They were worried that applying again would lead to a second refusal, and that a second refusal would count against them.

What we did

We read the refusal letter alongside the original application. The letter set out a right of appeal, but the problem was evidence that had not been provided rather than a mistake by the caseworker. An appeal would have taken many months. A fresh application with the missing documents was likely to be quicker and had a better chance of success.

We went through the husband’s records with him. We worked out which tax year his income should be assessed on and asked for the documents the rules require, including his tax calculations and tax year overviews from HMRC, his business bank statements and evidence of his registration as self employed. Some of these needed to be requested from his accountant, which took a few weeks.

We also checked every other part of the application again, including the accommodation, the English language evidence and the relationship evidence, so that nothing new could be raised.

We wrote a covering letter for the caseworker. It explained the earlier refusal openly, listed each document that answered the earlier concern and showed how the income figure was calculated from those documents.

The outcome

The new application was submitted with every required document in the right form. The visa was granted without any further requests from the Home Office.

The wife travelled to the UK shortly afterwards. We explained the next steps to the couple, including when she would need to apply to extend her permission and what evidence to keep in the meantime.

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