UK working holiday visa: The real cost of doing the 'London thing'

OPINION

Smug travel snaps and stories have given way to monotonous form-filling, bureaucracy and sky-high fees of late – yes, I've dredged my way through an elongated application to stay in the UK for a few more years.

The growing immigration queues have added fire to the calls for Britain to leave the EU and "regain control of its borders", a favourite argument of those campaigning for a so-called Brexit.

The Brexit brigade moan that they can do nothing to stop anybody from France, Spain or Poland entering the UK to work and live, so any immigration crackdown at the moment means its the poor Aussies and Kiwis caught in the crossfire.

See also: Tourist or traveller: What is the difference?

Of course this is Commonwealth diplomacy, so any crackdown is in the form of higher fees and stacks of paper. If, like me, an extension to your working holiday visa is made possible only after months of sucking up to the bosses in the hope of sponsorship, that too is becoming harder since David Cameron slapped on a new £1000 ($A1874) employer levy and minimum salary requirements.

I managed to just beat those and the new healthcare surcharge of around £150 per year that came into force on April 6 by mere days. If I was a few years older it'd be an extra £200 per year.

And that's on top of the sky high application fee of £592 to extend my break to ol' Blighty by three years, which excludes the mandatory £1000 airfares to apply from back in New Zealand. (Use those flashy foreign embassies to deal with migration issues? What a silly idea.)

After hearing horror stories of seven-week long waits and London bosses writing angry emails asking what's taking so long, I forked out another £157 to join the priority queue. Anything to make the UK-embassy-in-the-Philippines process it as soon as possible. That's right, although I've been temporarily booted back to New Zealand for copious form-filling, the box-ticking bureaucrats assess all applications from their cut-price outpost in Manila. This outsourcing adventure once left my old flatmate with a very expensive visa in an expired passport, with the wrong name spelling and a birthdate stated as 2008. Globalisation at its finest.