Scottish OAP slates ‘broken’ visa system
A 75-year-old man from Banchory has spent a week in a train station in Berlin helping refugees navigate the “confusing” visa application scheme for the UK.
Don Morrison travelled to Germany where he created and printed leaflets, which he translated into Ukrainian and Russian using online tools, to explain the application system to those fleeing the war in Ukraine – and personally helped dozens of families fill out application forms and obtain visa appointments to enter Scotland through the “super-sponsor” visa scheme.
Mr Morrison criticised the convoluted UK Government application process – as well as a lack of promotion of the Scottish Government’s scheme – as an “embarrassment”.
He said some families he had helped in Berlin had been offered visa appointments through the scheme at a visa office in Warsaw – 350 miles away – while on another occasion, only the government’s office in Cairo, Egypt, was listed as an option.
He said when war broke out in Ukraine he had thought back to the Balkans war, when his church, Banchory Ternan West, had offered aid to those affected. “I thought we could do the same thing again,” he said.
He had heard about the Scottish Government’s supersponsor scheme, which allows those applying to the UK Government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme to list the Scottish Government as their sponsor, meaning that they do not have to find a host sponsor independently before their arrival in Scotland.
Once here, they are then matched with hosts registered with the government.
However, Mr Morrison said that it was impossible for refugees to find out about the scheme. He said: “It’s a wonderfully creative initiative but totally useless if you don’t tell folk about it – and the folk who need to know about it are the very folk passing through the main railway stations, such as in Berlin.
“Out of frustration with government ineptitude and inaction,
I decided to come out myself, while other members of my church in Banchory organise host families.”
But he found the UK Governmentsystem impossible to navigate and spent many hours working with individual families – many of whom did not speak English – on their applications. The application forms were only available in English, while they found problems with the website hosted by TLS, the private company responsible for processing Ukrainians’ documentation.
He added :“the system is quite simply broken and in need of urgent replacement by someone with common sense and a bit of imagination.”
A UK Government spokesman said the Home Office had streamlined the visa system, while the Scottish Government said, while it believed there should be no need for visas, it was working to update information.