# ILR PEO Appointment Experience (Solihull)



## pagephillips (Jan 9, 2013)

I just wanted to post my PEO appointment experience, mostly because it seemed very different from the experiences I've read! Excuse the novel...

We had our appointment in Solihull which is about the same distance from us as Croydon and after reading about the nightmare that seems to be Croydon we opted for Solihull. Booking and even changing the appointment date was simple enough, didn't run into any issues there. Make sure you can call up within the time frame the next day to pay the appointment fee! Side note: hours are ridiculous, 9am-3pm. Must be nice, eh?

Our appointment was 12:30 which I would not advise, but as I work late shifts I didn't want to have to get up at some ungodly hour to drive to Solihull. It seemed that if you got there first thing or close to the end of the day your application was processed more quickly, though this might not always be the case. We arrived in Solihull around 10 just in case anything went wrong. Thankfully, there's tons of shopping and restaurants and things to do right around the office which made time go by much more quickly. We got to the office at 12:10 and had to wait outside of a door until a nice gentleman opened it, asked us what time our appointment was and let us in. We had to hand over our application form to another guy sat at a window who then asked my name. We went through security (a very high-tech free-standing metal detector directly inside the waiting room. Super secure.) and were told to sit down and that we would be given a number.

Half an hour later we were finally given a number, 222. There's a big TV showing where you are in the process of your application. We were pretty much at the back of the line. At least another half hour later we were called to "window 4" where a rather unhappy looking woman took my application and documents without saying more than five words. She typed up a storm and told us to go sit back in the waiting room. We walked back rather confused. Surely they might have at least a single question? Apparently not. The whole process lasted less than five minutes. 

40 minutes later I was called into another room to have my fingerprints taken and my photo taken (why on Earth do I need to provide all of these photos, then?!). The woman was very nice which made the whole process a bit better. Five minutes later we're back in the waiting room. At this point it was about 2:30 in the afternoon--we had spent much of the past two hours just waiting. About 30 minutes later we were finally told we could just leave and come back "around 4, but not later." We went across the street to have a drink and some food and headed back around 3:45. 

We get back in and have to go through security again after being told our application wasn't ready yet. We sat back down with our number and waited. During this time we heard three people being told their applications were not approved and that there was nothing they could do about it today. They were told to come around to a window in complete earshot of the entire waiting room and were just flat out told it wasn't approved and that was basically it. 

After that little show we were starting to get nervous! Finally at about 4 they called our number out and handed me a letter saying my "visa" was approved and to expect my BRP card in the mail within 7 days.

All in all, I was completely underwhelmed (though obviously pleased at the result!). Perhaps the process is a bit more involved for people who have a more complicated application, but ours was very straightforward and we had no reason to believe it would be denied. The lack of any questions whatsoever was really strange (not even my name other than when we signed in). The fact that there seemed to be only two people actually doing the work (one at "window 4" and one taking fingerprints) was doubly strange as there were a million other workers bustling around back and forth doing who knows what. People who arrived much later than we did were getting their answers at the same time, which is why I say ever a later appointment might not be a bad idea as they seem to want to get everything done by 4PM.

Definitely a strange experience and a nerve-wracking one at that as we really had no idea what was going on behind the scenes and we weren't given any idea whatsoever of any kind of time frame. The TV helped slightly, but numbers seemed to be called out at random. After almost three hours of sitting in a small white room with 20 other people you start to lose it a bit. After we were told to leave for a while I immediately felt better, less stressed, less irritated by the whole thing. Or maybe it was the fact that I was hungry, who knows.

I should also mention we did a Settlement Checking Service appointment the week before to ensure all of our documents were in order, so feel free to ask questions about anything if you're curious!


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