I am from Islamabad, Pakistan currently working in London on a Tier 2 visa and have recently got married and got my wife’s visa approved. I have been asked by several people about the process and decided that it might be a good idea to share it on a public forum for everyone else to see.
I was on a Tier 2 visa for 3 years by the time I got married back home in Islamabad, Pakistan. During our wedding we signed a Nikkah Nama (contract) which made our wedding official. Following that I came back to London with a plan to come back for a proper full-blown wedding a month later over the Christmas break.
Marriage Registration Certificate and NIC
Within a week of our marriage my wife told me that they went to the NADRA office and got a Marriage Registration Certificate from there. The next step was to get her a new NIC (National Identity Card) with her new surname. This experience turned out to be a nightmare to say the least. NADRA would not make her NIC without my presence and said that we both needed to make new NICs which would allot me a new Khandaan (family) number and put her on it. This meant that the process was put on hold until I came back to Pakistan for my next visit.
As I arrived I took my wife to the NADRA office at G-8 markaz which had huge queues and no chance of getting in. Thankfully the security guard there told us about a NADRA office in Blue Area (opposite Poly Clinic hospital) which only dealt with the relatively expensive, chip based NICs. As those cards are expensive and the office being less known, hardly anyone goes there which meant that we breezed through the process in no time. The card arrived in a week which I collected to complete Step 1.
Passport
Next step was her new passport (on her new surname). The passport office only takes payments in their NBP (National Bank of Pakistan) bank account so we had to get into huge queues to get that payment done. I however was in no mood to queue up so I found a man sitting outside the bank, paid him Rs 500 and got my payment done in minutes. With the payment done I went to the passport office (in G-10 Markaz) where I was told that it had been closed for the day (it might have been 2 in the afternoon). The security guard was kind enough to tell me that the office opens at 8:30am in the morning.
Using that crucial bit of information we went to the passport office the next day at 8:10am, which meant that we had just 5 people standing ahead of us. With just a handful of people leading us we went in and were done with the process in 20 minutes.
A bit of advice for those going through this process, make sure you go to the TCS counter there and ask them to deliver the passport at your home, which incurs a small fee but ensures that you would not have to queue up again for collection. Another point to note is that it would be a good idea to have a copy of your marriage registration certificate with you (which isn’t mentioned anywhere) but they asked us for one and would not submit my wife’s application until it was provided.
TB Test
The passport arrived in 48 hours and we were now ready for my wife’s TB test –which is mandatory for those visiting UK for more than 6 months. To get an appointment we sent an email to uktbappointments@iom.int asking for the earliest possible appointment (I was leaving for London in a couple of days now). They asked for some information and gave us an appointment the day before I was scheduled to leave. We deposited the requested amount in Standard Chartered Bank F-7 Markaz and were in G-6 for the TB test appointment the following morning. The TB test process went smoothly and the result was with us on the same day.
Visa Application Form
As I left for London we completed her visa application form together (it was all online at https://www.visa4uk.fco.gov.uk). The visa application form did not have a lot of help so there were things that I had to figure out myself which I would like to share below. Her visa type was the following:
Visa Type: Tier 2 (General) visa
Visa Sub Type: General Partner, up to 3 years
Another point to add is that in the visa application form I am the main applicant (even though it is her visa that we are applying for) and my wife is the dependent applicant.
Documents
Once we filled out the form I decided to meet a barrister (in London) to get the list of documents that my wife would need to provide with her visa application (their website was ambiguous). As per his advice I provided the following documents along with some additional documents which weren’t asked and prepared the following:
• My passport photocopy attested by Notory (F-8 Markaz)
• My UK residence permit attested by Notory (F-8 Markaz)
• My 6 month bank statements
• My 6 month pay slips
• My tenancy agreement form
• A signed no objection certificate from my landlord (mentioning that I have exclusive access to my room and that it is big enough to accommodate myself along with my spouse)
• A letter from my employer (standard one that confirms that I work there and how much I am paid)
• A signed sponsor letter from myself in which I wrote a romantic summary of our relationship (it was an arranged marriage but who says it can’t be romantic
)• My boarding passes from both Pakistan trips (Nikkah trip and the full-blown marriage trip)
• Random WhatsApp screenshots (one from each month of our relationship)
• Wife’s passport (latest and the previous one)
• 2 passport size photographs (with full name written in capital letters on back with a ball point pen)
• Marriage registration certificate
• Her O-Levels English result (I don’t think this was necessary)
• Nikkah photos (5 of them)
• TB test certificate
• Filled visa application form
• Receipt of all fees
A photocopy of each document was also provided.
Ordering
To make things easier for the visa application officer we went one step ahead and divided the documents into 6 groups named:
• Evidence of funds
• Main applicant details
• Main applicant residency
• Evidence of marriage
• Evidence of continued relationship
• Dependent applicant details
After this my wife pinned these piles up separately using paper clips. She also pinned a piece of paper on each pile containing the category name e.g evidence of funds and so on as shown below.
- Documents.jpg (44.87 KiB) Viewed 2504 times
Following this she got an appointment at Gerry’s visa office G-9 Markaz Islamabad and submitted the application (where surprisingly there were zero queues).
This was entailed by a wait that lasted exactly 15 days after which she received a sms asking her to collect her application. Upon submitting a copy of her NIC there they handed her the application which contained the good news that her visa was approved. Only 15 days of anxiety.
