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From28 November 2005, the British Embassy changed the process of applying for a visa and it no longer accepts personal callers at the Visa section. After a detailed tender consideration process, the British Embassy chose to appoint Visa Facilitation Services (VFS) as their Outsourcing partner in Russia. VFS is a well-established Indian company, and part of the Switzerland-headquartered Kuoni travel group. VFS operates Outsourcing in Russia in partnership with the Russian tourism operator, Star Travel.
From the middle of April till the beginning of May, they will open UK Visa Application Centres in 11 major cities of Russia, such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Rostov-na-Donu, Voronezh, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, Ufa, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk and Vladivostok. The center in Moscow will be opened on 2 May. When the new service is introduced, the British Embassy in Moscow and the British Consulates-General in St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg will no longer accept visa applications – all applications will have to be made at a UK Visa Application Centre.
The process is as follows:
A person or tour group applying for a UK visa will go to their nearest UK Visa Application Centre.
At the Centre, they will provide the completed visa application form, the required photographs, any supporting documentation relating to their proposed travel, and pay the fee for the appropriate type of visa.
The Centre will verify that all the documentation has been presented and the fee paid. It will then seal all the documents into a plastic pouch. A separate pouch will be used for each application. The pouch will be given a bar code so that it can be traced through the processing system.
The Centre will record the details of the applicant and the application onto a database. This will be operated on a dedicated computer system, unique to the UK Visa operation in the Russian Federation.
The computer equipment at each UK Visa Application Centre will have write-only permissions – staff will not be able to retrieve, download or alter data.
All data will be stored on a central server outside the Russian Federation. Only a very small number of specified and specially authorised staff of VFS and the British Embassy and Consulates-General will be able to access the data.
The applications in their pouches will be delivered to the British Embassy in Moscow or, in the cases of St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg, to the Consulates-General in those cities.
The Embassy or Consulate-General will download the data from the server and transfer it to the Embassy’s or Consulate-General’s visa processing database.
All applications will be adjudicated by UK Visa Officers. Only they will make the decision whether or not to issue a visa.
Once that decision is made, the passport and any other documents will be returned to the applicant via the UK Visa Application Centre at which they applied.
For the people that apply in Moscow, the whole process will take no more than 24 hours.
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