UK govt still undecided

Contrary to speculations that November 2013 is the date the new UK visa bond of ￡3,000 would take off, British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Ambassador Andrew Pocock, weekend, said his government was yet to take a decision on whether to go ahead with the policy or not.Ambassador Pocock, in a chat with Vanguard in Abuja, insisted that even if his government decided to implement the visa cash bond policy, only a fraction of 150,000 Nigerians granted travel visa annually would be subjected to the policy.

Pocock said: "We don't know, first of all, whether this will happen at all, but if 150,000 Nigerians travel to the UK every year, this scheme will probably only affect a couple of hundreds, which is a very small proportion of 150,000.   So it's not a catastrophe coming down the road."He noted that much of the uproar about the proposal was based on a misunderstanding of what the scheme was all about.He said: "What I said to your foreign minister is that as soon as I know what has been decided in London, I will tell the Nigerian government formally and we will tell the people of this country.

"But we are a long way away from that and we know what the Nigerian government probably thinks about this. We have passed those feelings back to the government in London, and they are taking it into consideration."On the speculation that November has been fixed for the take off of the policy, he said "Let me say a number of things, I have said this in public and am happy to say it again. First of all, there is no policy, it is simply something that is being discussed in the UK .