Reporting Form - Free Appointments

Reporting form – free appointments

ILPA is committed to improving UKVI’s Front End Services (FES). We raised issues around UKVI’s commercial partners in our response to the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration’s call for evidence in October 2020. In December 2020 we circulated a survey concerning third party issues and raised members’ responses to it at a meeting with UKVI on 17 December 2020. The lack of free appointments was the top reported issue. As a result, this form was established so that Members can report easily on this issue.

Since February 2021, ILPA has had regular meetings with Sopra Steria (also attended by UKVI) and the data members have provided has enabled us to evidence issues with appointment availability.

On 15 October 2024, TLScontact took over providing UK Visa and Citizenship Application Services (UKVCAS) from Sopra Steria. This resulted in an array of temporary difficulties, including a severe lack of appointment availability. ILPA understands that appointment availability is an issue UKVI and TLScontact are actively working to resolve.

ILPA will continue to have regular meetings with TLScontact (also attended by UKVI) in 2025. We want to ensure that free appointments continue to be available for those who need to enrol their biometrics.

To ensure that the data can be collated and presented effectively we would be grateful if you could:

Report one issue per form
Provide full details where possible
Use the additional comments section at the end of the form to provide further narrative (if required). We are also interested in finding out how long it is taking to actually be able to find and book a free appointment – it would therefore be useful to provide any additional dates/times that you attempted to book a free appointment in the additional comments section.

Please note that data collected by this form may be shared in anonymous form with TLScontact, UKVI, ILPA members, and others where relevant.

Free appointments

The data collected by this form will be anonymous, however, if you are happy for us to follow up with you directly then please leave your details here:
Who is the service provider? (TLScontact, VFS Global, or ‘other’. If ‘other’ please provide details):
What type of application are you trying to book a biometric enrolment appointment for?
Names and locations of the appointment centres at which you attempted to book an appointment:
Please put here the date(s) and time(s) of your attempt to book a free appointment:
When was the next available free appointment? (Please put ‘N/A’ if none were available)
If no free appointments were available, please provide details of the cheapest available appointment (including the date/appointment centre)):
If the lack of appointment availability led to booking a free or paid appointment at another centre, please provide the following details: 1) At which alternative centre did you book an appointment? and 2) What distance did the applicant have to travel to attend this?
What difficulties, if any, have been caused as a result of the free appointment shortage?
Additional comments, e.g.a timeline of all other dates/times that you attempted to book a free appointment (optional)
I am / we are*
- Members of ILPA
- Not members of ILPA
Name
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.