Hiya, so we’re in the process of applying for my wife’s ILR after five years back, and I’m a bit stumped by the “does your partner have any children living in the uk - provide details” question.
That may sound strange, so a bit of background for context - I’m only bothered about the issue as it pertains to my wife’s Ike, but without background it sounds insane!
Basically, last year a woman, a Russian national, I had relationship with about 15 years ago while living overseas and haven’t had any contact with for years appears to have moved to the uk and made a child maintenance claim against me for a 14-year-old child I previously was unaware of (I was aware she’d had a child, but she had told me it wasn’t mine, and that tallied with the timing and the fact she always seemed pretty busy in that department, although the date of birth cms have given me now is about five months earlier than she claimed at the time, which is feasible, but that’s not the issue here. CMS are convinced he’s mine so I pay what they tell me to every month for the next couple of years as it would be more expensive to drag it through the courts, and feasibly could still end up with me being the father, but 20-30k in solicitor’s fees poorer).
Now clearly given that he’s now registered with CMS the answer to the first question becomes yes, but as for the details it asks for I have no idea. I don’t know where they live, all CMS have given me is a first name, dob and confirmation that they have seen a Russian birth certificate that names me.
I’ve made no attempt to contact her since the original CMS contact as when I tried an old email I had for her to find out what was going on, the next thing I received was a court summons from 200 miles away for harassment (this was thrown out of court as I’ve had no contact with her for years save that one email. I’m not even sure how it got there in the first place as her statement consisted almost entirely of fictional events from several years and several thousand miles away, but anyway, irrelevant).
I’ve made no contact since and have no desire to as I’m not going through a court case every time I try, and given that her abuse and harassment of both myself and my now wife once she found out we were together 11 years ago, and fraudulent use of my stolen documents after we broke up, were key factors in our decision to move back here it’s really not a place I’m keen to go back to, child I don’t know or not. It was really very nasty, and since he’s almost an adult now anyway I’m easy enough to find for himself without involving the mother if he wants.
If I just write in the form that the child is estranged and I have only very basic details from cms, will this be sufficient? I don’t really want to go into in depth personal details with the home office (plus there’s only 500 characters allowed on the form anyway), but I also don’t want to prejudice my wife’s application by giving too little information. I have no idea if the child is a British citizen, although a subject access request from the home office suggests my name has not been used in any application to be here, but that could mean he is a British citizen and doesn’t need any application, or they’re both here as Russian citizens on whatever visa without my involvement, so doesn’t really help.
Like I say, bit of a strange one.