asohail80 wrote:Curious to know why HO is suddenly having delays for us March applicants. Any one have any clues?
My guess is that there were a lot of them. There was a fee rise in April, so lots of people who might have waited a bit applied in March to avoid it. The March thread goes all the way to page 4 before the dates on the posts are from April. Compare that to the February thread, where the posts from March start on page 2. While plenty of people apply without ever coming to these boards, I would bet that the number of people posting in timeline threads is correlated with how many applications the Home Office has received that month.
There seem to be a lot of people who applied in March, April, and May, and fewer who are applying in June. I suppose summer holidays will have something to do with that—people who are going away for some part of the summer will wait under they're back to submit their applications. I suspect the wait times will decrease once the May applications have been processed.
Furthermore,
UKVI hired/are hiring more civil servants for their Liverpool office, who are due to start work in July. I don't know if that will ultimately make a difference to wait times, since people will need to be trained and someone who's new to the job will almost certainly be slower than someone who's been doing it for a while. Still, more bodies will help move all processes along and it sounds like they're hiring specifically to deal with the number of applications from EU citizens.