Hundreds of Aussies to lose UK visas

Hundreds of Australians are now feared to have overstayed their British visas because they have been repeatedly bumped off flights to return home.

People walk past Shakespeare's Globe theatre in central London. Picture: AFP

Hundreds of Australians are now feared to have overstayed their British visas because they have been repeatedly bumped off flights to return home.

A deadline for stranded Australians expires on Monday and those who haven’t done the paperwork will be in breach of the law.

The British government had been automatically extending visas each month because of the pandemic, allowing those with visas that expired as far back as January to legally stay in the country, but these extensions end on Monday.

The British government announced it would stop the extensions on August 10 and added a grace period to the end of the month for people to formally apply for visa extensions, because “travel restrictions are lifting ­globally’.

The government said visa holders were now “expected to take all reasonable steps to leave the UK where it is possible to do so or apply to regularise your stay in the UK’’.

For Australians, restrictions have actually tightened as the caps on incoming travellers snowball and economy-paying passengers are repeatedly bumped, while business-class travellers are also now being denied boarding because of the cap numbers.

There is outrage among Australians that their situation is made worse because airlines are not flying passengers to the cap limits of 4000 a week. However, airlines are being told by the Australian government how many passengers they can carry for each flight.

More than 2000 Australians have registered with the Australian high commission in Britain to return to Australia and are angered at being abandoned. The high commission has repeatedly urged Australians to contact the UK Home Office about their visas, but some Australians may not ­realise they now have to do this.

Britain says Australia is the only country in the world to have actively restricted its citizens returning, although a handful of countries are difficult for citizens to return to because of so few flights.

Amid the chaos, it is impossible for Australians to be able to accurately tell the British government when they can return, and it is feared they could be stranded well into the middle of next year.

Officials have told The Australian that “the UK is clear that bankrupting yourself to book a flight is not expected’’ but Australians have to submit a confirmed flight in the future in the paperwork for a visa assurance to allow them to legally stay in the country.

Behind the scenes, the Australian government is continuing to assess whether to organise repatriation flights from India and Europe and put passengers in a quarantine facility in the Northern Territory.

There are also plans to provide means-tested interest-free loans to stranded Australians because Australians cannot access social security. Many stranded Australians in Britain have been hospitality workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic.

Some are venting their frustration on a website called removethecaps.com set up by Pieter Den Heten, a Dutch-Australian web designer who has been unable to return to Australia to see his partner. The website logs where Australians are stranded around the world.

Mr Den Heten said Australian permanent residents were also posting on the site to say they had been refused exit from the ­country.