NCS in the Birmingham area - tips please!
Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2012 4:53 pm
Hello
My wife is about to apply for citizenship having been granted her ILR this week following 5 years in the UK on an Ancestry visa. We have been married for 18 months now.
We are applying for her citizenship as soon as her biometric card arrives (hopefully next week). Our windo for applying is very short as we will be leaving the country for around 2 years in January 2013, and we want to get her citizenship before we go. I'm hopeful that hers will be a strigthforward application as she has very few basences, has been here for over 5 years and we've been married for some time.
1. Does anyone have any positive or negative feedback about the various NCS services near Birmingham? I have heard that Birmingham City Council are the one of the most expensive and have the longest waiting times, although they are the most local to us.
2. Are there any tips for making sure that we get an appointment ASAP, and anything we can do to speed the process up? Is it worth taking our own copies of all of her documents with us?
3. Can you submit an application without your passport etc if you get the documents certified as true copies, for example by a solicitor or magistrate? This might save us time instead of waiting for the NCS appointment.
4. I assume that we need to wait for her biometric card to arrive before we apply, is this true or can we go ahead without it?
5. An advice on which ceremony location to request so that we aren't waiting for weeks once the citizenship is granted?
Thanks in advance!
My wife is about to apply for citizenship having been granted her ILR this week following 5 years in the UK on an Ancestry visa. We have been married for 18 months now.
We are applying for her citizenship as soon as her biometric card arrives (hopefully next week). Our windo for applying is very short as we will be leaving the country for around 2 years in January 2013, and we want to get her citizenship before we go. I'm hopeful that hers will be a strigthforward application as she has very few basences, has been here for over 5 years and we've been married for some time.
1. Does anyone have any positive or negative feedback about the various NCS services near Birmingham? I have heard that Birmingham City Council are the one of the most expensive and have the longest waiting times, although they are the most local to us.
2. Are there any tips for making sure that we get an appointment ASAP, and anything we can do to speed the process up? Is it worth taking our own copies of all of her documents with us?
3. Can you submit an application without your passport etc if you get the documents certified as true copies, for example by a solicitor or magistrate? This might save us time instead of waiting for the NCS appointment.
4. I assume that we need to wait for her biometric card to arrive before we apply, is this true or can we go ahead without it?
5. An advice on which ceremony location to request so that we aren't waiting for weeks once the citizenship is granted?
Thanks in advance!