Aly & Hannah’s Story | We’re very grateful for the help we got along the way to reunite our family in the UK
Aly and Hannah met in Germany in 2016. Aly’s parents are Iranian and Egyptian. After getting married in Italy in 2019, they knew they wanted to live together in the UK, to be closer to family.
Hannah is British and she was teaching English as a foreign language in Italy. After a series of bureaucratic hurdles, the couple have arrived in Scotland to start their new life together this summer.
“We first found out about the Surinder Singh route in January. This type of visa application is specifically for family members of British citizens, who have lived in the EU with their family member since before the end of 2020.
Hannah remembers the rollercoaster which was being a Brit in Europe during the Brexit referendum. With many differing opinions on Brexit, it gave some people a reason to treat British people differently, as people assumed everyone they met had voted for Brexit. Within friends and close ones, most people seemed to think Brexit was a joke that shouldn’t have happened.
As we’ve lived together in Italy and have been married since before Brexit, we got advice to make sure our application was as comprehensive as possible. We applied before the deadline of 29 March 2022, putting a lot of work into making sure we were providing as much information as possible, translating documents and cross-referencing everything.
In May, we got a request for more documents. It asked us to prove that Hannah had comprehensive sickness insurance (CSI) in Italy, covering both of us. We were really surprised by this enquiry, as Aly was holding his own insurance separately, so there was no need to be insured twice.
We supplied a response with the help of our solicitor, but to no avail. We were so disappointed when we were rejected due to a very obscure requirement. When the news came in, it was like a punch in the gut. We felt more annoyed when we read the reason, as it made absolutely no sense.
We reached out to the3million and their help was crucial. Advocating on our behalf in partnership with our lawyers, we got the decision overturned and we received our family travel permit.
Throughout the time we spent waiting, we kept ringing up the UK Visas and Immigration helpline, trying to get information with little success and at a high cost. It was so stressful being in limbo, getting standard responses such as “Your case is under consideration”, “I can see it’s awaiting a decision and you should be hearing soon”, “Your application is being processed”.
It made us feel our case was close to a decision when it wasn’t. It was really difficult not knowing and we were in limbo for a lot of time.
We had to escalate our case, as our contract was coming to an end on our rental property and we needed a decision to come through. It hasn’t been smooth sailing, but we kept on being resilient and pushing forward at every step.
We’ve now been in Scotland for a few weeks and we’re excited for what the future holds. Aly is enrolling on an immigration advisor course and he’s also going to coach football, in addition to his day job in IT, while Hannah will continue to teach people English through TEFL.
We still consider ourselves lucky. It felt like a nightmare at the time, it’s definitely been a rollercoaster but all difficulties were sorted in the end. We feel very fortunate being here together now and we’re grateful to everyone who helped us along the way.”
