Consulate and TLS

October: questions about income

On 2/10/20 we wrote to the French Consul General to ask about income requirements for a VLST visa. We followed it up with another letter on 20/10/20. The letters are in a single PDF (the follow-up letter appears first) here.

The Consul General replied to our follow up letter. Their reply is here.

We published these on our Facebook page and encouraged people to comment. The post can be seen here.

Late September Early October

In late September we resurveyed the now 8000 membership of two Facebook groups whose membership is people based in the UK with 2nd homes in France. We asked them about their plans for a visa.

The results showed a similar percentage (22%) to the July survey (20%) of people would be applying for a long stay visa. However the results highlighted that the peak demand would be when the French opened up their systems to application from British Nationals and that 95% of demand would be received by the end of March

We alerted the Consulate and TLS to this new information. We await a reply before commenting further.

Late August Early September

We analysed a report to the French Senate in November 2019## concerning consular activities in 2018. The report showed that

• there were some 1200 long-stay visa applications in 2018.

• the consulate was planning for 2,000-10,000 visa applications as a result of Brexit

• all visa decisions were taken by consular officials

In late July we carried out a detailed survey of people with second homes in France. We analysed the data in August and concluded that there would be a large surge in demand for visa in the spring of 2020 with little demand after March. We estimated the total demand to be in excess of 20,000 applications. More information on the survey is here

We deduced that there will be a high risk of gridlock in visa applications as second-home owners swamp the consulate with applications before they make their spring visit to France.

We wrote to the Consulate and TLS. The Consulate did not respond in any form. TLS said they had passed the information to the Consulate

There is more detail here

Early 2020

One of the team members had a short email dialogue with the French Consulate in London. Replies to initial enquiries were helpful and led to the production of worst case scenario document which includes the text of the responses. Further enquires did not receive any useful responses so the dialogue stopped.