Refund when application refused as Invalid

Home Office did not have the information requested.

Dear Home Office,

My wife applied for Indefinite Leave to Remain (in person appointment at Croydon Office) as a spouse of a settled person/British Citizen (under Appendix FM, 5 years route), her application was refused as she hasn´t completed 5 years yet, therefore Case worker treated this application as a Limited Leave to Remain application. Case worker wrote in the decision letter that we need pay the IHC charge within 10 Days and if don´t pay the application will be treated as invalid. Now could you please advise regarding refund of the fee per the below;

1) if we dont pay IHC charge and application gets treated as Invalid, Does that mean Home Office has to refund the Fee in Full including Premium in person appointment fee?

2) if there is no refund in above situation (my point 1 above), Can we claim back the difference i.e. what we paid for Indefinite Leave to Remain application minus the fee for a Limited Leave to Remain application (which is approx £1,000).

3) finally, another thing i realised, the Fee we paid was old fee (pre April 2018 fee) as we booked appointment in March, in the meantime Home Office announced new fees from April 2018 onward. Now our appointment was on 8th April 18, however our fee paid was per Old fee/charge. In this situation is it possible we request a full refund on the basis we didn´t pay correct application fee?

Any help much appreciated.

Yours faithfully,
matyana

FOI Requests, Home Office

Matyana,

Please be aware that we have decided to handle your correspondence of 25 April outside the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. This is because it does not meet the criteria for a Freedom of Information request, as it does not ask for recorded information.

Below is a link to the ICO guidance for the criteria for valid requests under the Act:
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisatio...

We will provide an answer to your query, but it will be answer outside of the provisions of the Act.  You should expect to receive a response in due course.

Thank you,

P. Zebedee
FOI Requests
Home Office

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Digital Correspondence Allocation Team, Home Office

Dear Sir / Madam ,

Thank you for your e-mail of 25 April.

Our response to your enquiry will involve asking for or disclosing your personal data. We cannot do this via ‘WhatDoTheyKnow.com’, which is a public website. I would therefore be grateful if you would let us have your personal e-mail to which we can reply.

Alternatively, if you would like to contact us directly, you can at the following address:

[email address]

Please also refer to our website for guidance by using this link:

https://www.gov.uk/homeoffice

Yours faithfully,

UK Visas and Immigration

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