ILR. Absences exceeding 18 months in 10 years

[happydoc]

I have been in the country as a student since August 1999 and have always been on a student visa. I have no illegal gaps in my visa. I will complete my 10 years stay in August this year. I currently have a student visa expiring in Jan 2013.

I would be grateful if the experts on these extremely helpful boards can answer my following 2 questions.

Question No. 1
In these last 10 years I do have a gap of 16 days while outside the country. My visa which was for A level studies was expiring on 31.8.04. However I left the country before my visa expired. I applied on 8.9.04 in my home country to continue with my University education and entered UK on 17.9.04.

The question that I have has largely been answered by very careful research of these boards and my current understanding is that while previously it was considered a break in continuity of residence but after recent clarifications this is not considered as a break since I left UK before expiry of my visa and then subsequently entered with a new visa. I would be grateful if experts here can confirm that my understanding is correct.

Question No, 2
Being a student in boarding school and then at the university, I always spend my Christmas, Easter and summer holidays every year with my parents in the home country. Each year a combination of Christmas (20), Easter (20) and summer holidays (60) come to roughly 100 days a year which then totals nearly 1000 days over 10 years. This obviously exceeds 18 months or 545 days.

I am assuming that this will create a problem for my continuity of residence as 2.1.3 of Long residence IDI (Chapter 18 ) states:
Continuity of residence should be considered to have been broken if the applicant has spent a total of more than 18 months absent from the United Kingdom during the period in question.

Subject to that, continuity shall not be considered to have been broken where an applicant is absent from the United Kingdom for a period of 6 months or less at any one time, provided that the applicant has existing limited leave to enter or remain upon his departure and return.

I would be grateful if the experts can look at this second point also and tell me whether I will have a problem when I apply for my ILR in July and if there is a way I can deal with this.

I would like to know as to how they calculate the no. of days outside UK since there is only an entry stamp but no exit stamps. Nobody keeps their tickets over a 10 year period neither it is a requirement to produce these tickets with the application. I would not dream of putting any wrong information on my application form as I have tried very hard over the last 10 years to keep everything legal for my eventual ILR and Naturalization but it would be interesting to know whether they are just relying on you to provide the dates or whether they have an independent way to check these absences.

I thank everybody in advance for the help as well as all those people who give up their precious time to help answer people’s queries.

Thanks for all your help