The rejection came in the form of an official UK Border Agency letter stating the reasons why your application was denied. Of course non of this impacted in your permanent residency status. It only impacted in your tax per year and your civil rights since you are not a citizen. For the appeal process you needed to send a letter to the UK B. Agency explaining why you where in disagreement with the decision based on their own letter. If there was a paper missing or a miss interpretation you had to send the copy of the originals with the letter for them to be reviewed. It the best of cases you could have an interview with an administrative to walk through your lodge and finally clarify the situation.

From September 1^st 2010 this same process will have a FEE applied to it. By the price of £100 you will be able to appeal your citizenship application. That is only to start the process at the Border Agencies. They will review the paperwork you submitted and take a decision based on your dispute. If you are unlucky and the Agency rejects the application again you won’t be refunded a penny, UK needs to cover the administrative expenses of reviewing your lodge.

If you are indeed lucky you will be refunded £20 since the remaining £80 will be used for the ceremony expenses. Oh!, you thought you paid for that when you submitted the lodge in the first place? Well we understand your mistake; the fact that we at the UK Border Agency made a mistake and rejected the lodge in the first place so you had to appeal and pay an extra fee of £100 to finally be reimbursed 20 for a citizenship ceremony you already paid for is just a small detail in your mind. Don’t pay attention to it.

And don’t even remember the fact that you paid for the Like in the UK booklet and later to sit for the test, careful as many times as you needed to reach the passing score.

What are you going to do next with your rightfully reimbursed £20? A Guinness?

In 2009 the highest number of applications came from India, with 79.2% of the 100,001 who sat the test passing. Elsewhere in the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan provided the second most (63.8% of 68,279) and Bangladesh the fifth most although with a much lower success rate (44% of 38,085).

The third most came from the Philippines where 78.1% of the 53,609 passed the test, and the forth from Iraq with only 47.9% of the 40,200 applicants achieved the 75% pass mark. There appears a correlation between language proficiency and success in the test, with applicants from English-speaking countries in general faring much better. Applicants from the USA, Canada and Australia, for example, scored 97.7%, 96.9% and 98.0% respectively. Turkey (30,014) and Afghanistan (29,650), although providing the eighth and ninth most applicants, only achieved pass rates of 45.% and 47.8% respectively.

The multiple-choice test, which comprises 24 questions covering such subjects as the politics, culture and history of the UK and lasts 45 minutes, has faced its fair share of criticism since its introduction in 2005.

The scarcity of questions related to key moments in British history has been met with disapproval, especially when obscure questions ask, for example, what year British women were given the right to divorce their husbands (answer: 1857). According to historian Dominic Sandbrook, ‘the questions betray a  weird obsession with immigration, multiculturalism and the intimate workings of the welfare system’. Critics have argued that in attempting to capture the essence of ‘Britishness’ the makers of the test missed the mark, with the result an irrelevant quiz which the majority of British citizens by birth would probably fail.
The scepticism of the ‘Life in the UK Test’ was recently echoed by American author Bill Bryson, a long-time resident in the UK. He recently told an audience that although he is eligible for British citizenship and would like to apply, he is afraid of failing the ‘Life in the UK Test’ and what the reaction in the media would be.

Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Mail

Life in the UK Test Results in Full

Note that this change does not affect Northern Ireland.

For more information about the change in the tobacco law, visit Smokefree.