Only One of Us Was Approved… Now We Know Why

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's video. Look who's joined me!

Hi!

Now if you remember, a few weeks back I posted a video about our South African residency update, that mine had come through but James's hadn't, and I promised that we would record an update as soon as we got one. Well, we've got one, so we thought we would share it with you.

So I got an email first saying that the decision has been made and it's been forwarded through to VFS, so I need to go pick it up. And then a call from VFS to tell me to go pick it up, but they won't tell me what the decision was. So, um, spent 3 hours on Friday getting to VFS because you have to go between 4 and 5 to pick it up, only to find out it's been declined.

It's crazy, isn't it? So it's a 6-hour journey from here to London and back to receive a piece of paper that says it's been declined, and I've no idea— we'll explain why in a second, but I've I have no idea why they can't just email you with that notification. After all, I got an email saying with a letter enclosed saying congratulations, your residency has been approved. Please pay us 120,000 rand. So why they can't do the same thing with things that are accepted or declined, I just don't know. So six hours of traveling, thirty pounds later, James has got a brown envelope.

Yeah, basically they declined it because. They only looked at our marriage certificates. We sent that in April 2025 as supporting evidence to show the continuation of our relationship.

Big mistake.

Yeah, they never looked at any of the other evidence that we sent of our relationship from 2011 till the time of application, 2024. Literally just the marriage certificate.

Yeah, and if you remember, when we made our application, we sent a pack at least this big. With loads of evidence, financial information, travel information together.

Cohabiting information.

Yeah, affidavits from 5 of our friends saying we've been in a relationship and everything else, and they just completely ignored that and took a very easy shortcut and said, well, your marriage certificate, you've only been married a year, so you don't meet the 5-year requirement for marriage. But the application clearly says that you have to be a cohabiting spouse or married, so they should have considered that. So now what happens, James?

Well, we've got 10 working days from picking up of the letter to do an appeal, and I'm going to be away for a week of that. So we've literally got 48 hours to put together an appeal. So luckily we had all our supporting documentation from the original application, so we're reattaching it again for them to go through with explicit instructions. That the marriage certificate was only supporting information. Look at the rest of the information in here.

Yeah, so we put a marriage certificate right at the back of this, this time, and we've also included photos of us going way back to 2011 that are timestamped showing we were in a relationship. So we hope that that might mean that the appeal will be successful, but there's also a danger because it was submitted under 2017 6, that they may just look at it and say, well, you're my spouse and I haven't been a resident for 5 years, so you're declined. So that might be the other reason. So I don't know what will happen, but basically we've got to submit this pack of information on Monday. It's then going to sit in London for a few months, probably be shipped off to Pretoria, wait for probably another 2 years for someone to look at it and hopefully—

Actually do their job.

Well, we hope— hopefully it won't be the same person, that they have an appeals process where someone different looks at it and will then accept it, and hopefully we'll hear a positive outcome at some point in the future. But it's so utterly frustrating. We have spent hours over this weekend doing it, and basically, thank God we still had everything from the submissions. Every page was scanned. We did work with Integrate for our— Integrate, rather, for our initial application, But obviously James has declined on Friday at four or five o'clock, so they had shut office and we have to go on Monday. So we've emailed them, but you know we may get a response too late once we've made the submission, and they may tell us to do something entirely different from what we're doing. But you know we have to just take our risk. So hopefully this appeal will be successful, but if it's not, we've got a few other channels to follow as well. But also we James could apply for a spousal visa, which is. A 2-year visa, which is much easier to get, and we don't need the 5-year marriage or me being resident for 5 years. We can just apply on the back of me being a resident. And so we might go down that route if this is denied. And then finally, once I have been a resident for 5 years, James could then apply for residency as a spouse, and that will be a lot more straightforward because we'll have been married more than 5 years at that point. I'll have residency. So there are ways forward, so it's not a complete disaster.

It's just put a spanner in the works of our imminent future plans. We had— we've got loads in the pipeline which we'll talk about further down the line, but this was a major part of it.

Yeah, we were hoping to be able to stay in South Africa for more than 90 days, but we may not be able to. Anyway, so we're going tomorrow, the time of recording. We don't even know whether you need to make an appointment. We can't find that out, but we're assuming that we can walk in. To submit the appeal, and of course we'll tell you what happens at the VFS office once we've done that. We've got a bunch of questions here that we want to ask them about the process timescales and all the rest of it. So we'll let you know the outcome of that tomorrow as this saga continues, and we'll outline this in the next part of the video. Wish us luck, fingers crossed, and all that stuff. Good morning. We have arrived. We've just walked from Farringdon, yeah, and this is to drop off the appeal. Appeal, yeah. The trains are a disaster in Eastbourne today, so we've had to drive an hour to Burgess Hill and get the train from there, but at least that was straightforward. So we're carrying on walking down here to the VFS office and we'll let you know what happens. So anyway, we just got back from The VFS office. So tell us what happened, James.

Luckily, we emailed them on Friday with what was going on. They came back to us this morning to say turn up between 12 and 2. Uh, we got to VFS and the guy was like, oh no, you can't come in till 12:30. So we showed him the email.

Yeah, lucky we had that email. Yeah, because then they let us in, went downstairs, and they just say the queues out— I didn't video because I didn't want to get in trouble, but the queues outside were massive. So So we thought massive long wait, but yeah.

So we went inside, got our ticket, sat down, 10 minutes later got called in. Yeah, gave the pack, asked loads of questions to make sure because we don't get a reference number if you're doing an appeal, so there's no way of tracking it. But they did say they're going to send it to the embassy straight away.

Yeah, so it goes to the South African Embassy tomorrow and then sits there for ages and goes back to Pretoria, it's going to take at least 18 months. The guy at VFS wasn't very clued in about these appeals, so we asked for some kind of reference number, some acknowledgement that we had submitted the appeal within the 10-day limit, and he said, oh well, there isn't anything. So we got him to send us an email, and we also took a photo of the stamped application appeal document with, with the date stamp on it as well, so we have got some evidence, and now we wait. And the email from VFS that we got telling us to come between 12 and 2 said it's going to be at least an 18-month wait now, so here we are yet again, and obviously we'll keep you posted with what happens next. Okay, it's the next day now, and I just wanted to wrap up this week's short video. So obviously you saw Our adventures in going to the VFS office, and now we're back into the waiting game. Anyway, one of the things I love about the community—I love all your comments—is how helpful you can be. And someone commented on the previous residency video that we published a while back that actually I was slightly wrong, and it's not that I have to go to South Africa every three years to maintain my residency. But actually I have to go there within the first year, and that means an unplanned visit for me to Cape Town. So I'm actually going to Cape Town at the end of October into November so I can activate my residency. So I guess I go through, give them the residence certificate or permit, make sure that they stamp my passport not with a 90-day visitor visa but with an actual residency. I'm not quite sure how it happens. If anybody knows, do Leave a comment and let me know so I am warned about how the process works. But anyway, that means I will have activated my residency before the 20th of May 2027, which would be a year from when it was issued. And as you'll find out, we weren't planning to be in Cape Town until later next year. We'll tell you all about that in the next video. So anyway, that's meant an extra trip, which also means an extra budget as well. So I'll tell you a bit more about that in the future videos, but I just kind of wanted to wrap this whole residency saga up by sharing that news with you. And you know, it— does it make— leave a bit of a bad taste in our mouths about South Africa? Yes, it does. Now of course I've no idea about how complicated the process would be for a South African who wanted to get UK residency, so I can only speak from our experience, but it's certainly been super frustrating. It feels like the reasons they rejected James's residency are incorrect. It feels like we put all this massive amount of paperwork together and they ignored it all and only looked at our marriage certificate and then declined that, as you've already heard. So we were really hoping this time that maybe it goes to a different department to handle appeals and not the same people, and they will actually read all of the documentation that we've sent. And then in 18 months' time, we'll hopefully get a positive outcome. I guess there's probably a sort of 50/50 chance it will be accepted or rejected. We just don't know really, um, but based on why they rejected it the first time, we, we are legally countering that because you don't have to be married for 5 years. You have to prove that you've been in a relationship for more than 5 years, and we've been together 15 years now. So anyway, so of course watch this space. Make sure you've hit subscribe button, hit the like, the bell so you're alerted when a new video goes live. And of course we're going to keep you Up to date with all the twists and turns that this fun journey has taken. But other than that, we will see you next week for more travel adventures and more news, because you might have just heard that I said we weren't planning on being in South Africa for the usual winter period this coming year. That's '26 into '27, and if you join us next week, you'll find out exactly why.