Short summary

My six-year-old son Neo and I face losing our home in the UK following serious Home Office caseworking errors.

The Home Office wrongly treated an application for professional endorsement as though it were a visa application and, on that basis, stopped considering my outstanding fee waiver, which was the first step towards our Family Route application. It did not adequately notify me that it considered this to have ended our lawful status, while my official UKVI digital status continued to show that we could remain in the UK while a decision was pending.

I relied on that information in good faith and submitted my Global Talent visa application believing we remained lawfully in the UK. It was only months later, when the Home Office contacted me about the application, that I first learned it considered us to have become overstayers months earlier. Despite the evidence I then provided explaining what had happened, the Home Office refused my application on that basis.

I am now challenging that decision with a specialist immigration and public law legal team. This case is about protecting our home, but also about whether people should be able to rely on official government communications and whether public bodies are held accountable when their errors have life-changing consequences.

A Stand for Our Home, Our Values, and Home Office Accountability

This campaign is first and foremost about protecting our home, but it also raises a serious wider issue. As the Home Office increasingly relies on digital eVisas, interconnected systems and individual caseworker decisions, administrative errors, unclear notices and inaccurate official records can have profound consequences. We are not the first people to experience problems of this kind.

My six-year-old son Neo and I are now taking legal action to challenge the Home Office's decision, hold it accountable for the errors in our case, and defend the principle that people must be able to rely on official government communications and processes.

Our Story and What Is at Stake

I am a dual German and US citizen and Neo's single parent and sole carer. We live in London, which is home to us both.

England was home to me long before I returned here with Neo legally on a Skilled Worker visa three and a half years ago. I spent the second half of my childhood here, including going to school here as a teenager. My father had close ties to England, spoke English with me at home, and brought me here many times, even before I moved as a child. 

With no immediate family on my side elsewhere in the world, the people I have considered family since my childhood here are now the closest family Neo and I have, and we see them regularly. Raising Neo here has deepened my own roots even further. Our home, family, close friends, his school and our community are here. This is the country where I want to raise him and where I hope to grow old. The UK is our home.

What Happened

Although England has long felt like home, I am not a British citizen and growing up here did not give me an automatic right to live here as an adult. So when the employment that sponsored my Skilled Worker visa ended a year and a half ago, I chose to pursue a Family Route application on human rights grounds so we could remain in our home.

As the first step towards the Family Route application, I applied for a Fee Waiver because my limited savings needed to support Neo and me through the lengthy visa process, which can take 12 months or more. While that application was pending, our lawful immigration status continued under what is known as Section 3C leave.

As a single parent, and with Fee Waiver decisions themselves taking several months, financial pressure mounted quickly as my right to work was limited to my former employer and I had stopped working in February 2025. I explored the Global Talent route, another legitimate immigration route that became available to me in autumn last year and could allow me to return to work sooner and adequately support my son and myself. 

In November 2025, I applied to Arts Council England to be endorsed as an artist of Global Talent, a preliminary step towards obtaining a Global Talent visa. This was an assessment of my professional work and achievements as an artist, not an application for a visa. 

Because I could not know whether I would receive the endorsement, I pursued the Family Route in parallel and never withdrew my fee waiver application, fully intending to rely on the Family Route if the endorsement was not approved.

In December 2025, the Home Office informed me that it would not consider my Fee Waiver but that I would receive a decision on my paid application in due course. With my official UKVI digital status confirming that I had the right to remain in the UK, I felt assured that we were safe to stay.

At the end of February 2026, Arts Council England endorsed me for Global Talent, and I submitted the Global Talent visa application at the beginning of March 2026 as soon as I had secured a loan to pay the fees, believing that we remained lawfully in the UK and I was entitled to apply.

At the end of April 2026, I learned for the first time that the Home Office considered our lawful residence to have ended, and therefore my Global Talent application to be "out of time", when they gave me an official opportunity to explain why I had not applied before the date on which they considered our lawful status to have ended.

I immediately submitted a comprehensive response with complete evidence, including screenshots of my active UKVI status, the Home Office's own communications and evidence that I had never withdrawn my fee waiver application.

Despite that evidence, the Home Office refused the application without adequately engaging with the material evidence and relevant considerations I had submitted, and Neo and I were told we no longer had permission to be in the UK.

The Home Office Errors and Digital Misdirection We Are Challenging

Our legal team argues that the Home Office made a critical legal error in December 2025 when it mistook my Global Talent endorsement application for a visa application and, on that basis, said it would "not consider" my outstanding fee waiver.

Aside from an endorsement application not being a visa application, "not considering" a fee waiver is not a lawful decision on it. Our legal team argues that, because no lawful decision was ever made, my fee waiver application remained outstanding and our lawful status continued.

Furthermore, the Home Office's letter stated - an assumption without grounds - that I wished to abandon the Family Route, and they did not give me an adequate opportunity to correct the assumption.

The Home Office's notification also failed to warn me that it considered our lawful status to be coming to an end and omitted the standard instructions on how to preserve it. Had I been made aware, I would have taken immediate steps to protect our lawful status. Instead, my official UKVI online account continued to show my immigration status as active and lawful. I relied on that official information in good faith.

Our legal team argues that I was not an overstayer when I made my application, and the refusal to grant my application for a Global Talent visa was unlawful. 

What We Stand to Lose

If I accept the Home Office's decision, the consequences for my family are devastating.

On the Home Office's current assertion that we have overstayed for more than thirty days, leaving voluntarily at my own expense would result in a mandatory 12-month ban on me returning to the UK, jeopardising whether Neo and I would be able to return home during key years of his childhood. Even after that period, accepting an adverse overstaying history could create continuing uncertainty for future immigration applications.

We face losing our home, our close friends and wider community, and the people who have become our family. Neo would lose his school, friendships, familiar routines and trusted relationships.

Professionally, as an artist, experience designer and creative director working across arts, brand, cultural and educational experiences, I would lose the professional community and career I have rebuilt here.

Furthermore, I stand to lose the educational startup I have spent two years building alongside my career and which I see as my life's work. Spark&Bond creates story-led participatory learning experiences for primary school children and their families and has been successfully piloted in a London primary school. But Spark&Bond has now been on hold for over a year because I cannot responsibly seek investment without certainty about my immigration position. Rebuilding the company elsewhere would set the work back by years or make it impossible for me to continue it at all. I would lose the groundwork, partnerships and knowledge I spent years building here, including my educator and child psychology partner, and I would have to establish whether another country was even right for it before knowing whether I could rebuild it there.

At 46, raising Neo alone, with no immediate family elsewhere in the world and already carrying the financial consequences of this process, starting again somewhere else would not simply mean finding another job and another flat. It would mean rebuilding our entire support system, community, professional relationships and financial stability from the beginning.

We stand to lose everything.

A Parenting Imperative: Why I Have to Fight

Beyond the legal arguments, financial costs, and career sacrifices, there is a fundamental parenting decision driving this legal challenge. 

How do I explain to my six-year-old son why we are being forced to leave our home?

I am deeply committed to raising Neo with honesty and integrity in ways appropriate to his age. If I accept an unlawful decision without challenging it, I am left with choices that compromise those values. I could protect him from a harsh reality by taking the blame for Home Office errors. That would be deeply dishonest and wrong. Alternatively, I could tell him that an official government institution made serious mistakes and that we simply had to accept the consequences. That would erode his trust in societal institutions before he has even had the chance to build it.

The only principled path is to stand firm. By taking on this challenge, I can look my son in the eye and teach him a vital life lesson: when an institution makes a serious error, you do not accept it quietly. You stand up, hold decision makers to account, and defend your rights. Even in the face of uncertainty, demonstrating composure, integrity, and courage is the greatest lesson I can give him.

Why This Matters Beyond Our Family

This legal challenge is first and foremost about protecting Neo and our home, but it raises a much larger principle.

Thousands of people across the UK are navigating a complex, fully digital immigration system where administrative errors can quietly alter lives. People must be able to trust the information the Government gives them without the need to hire specialist lawyers.

By seeking a Judicial Review, we are advocating for the principle that public bodies must be held accountable for their mistakes and that every individual has the right to rely on official government communications.

Why We Need Your Support

Until the refusal, I had navigated this complex system almost entirely alone because I could not afford legal representation. While I tried to find free legal help early in the process and again at later points, the charities and organisations providing free immigration advice that I approached were too overwhelmed to have anyone available to take my case.

After the refusal, I knew I could no longer navigate this alone. With only a very short period in which to challenge the decision through Administrative Review and protect us from removal, I tried again to find free legal representation, but was again unsuccessful.

By then, I had already exhausted my savings and accumulated more than £24,000 in personal debt to cover our rent and living expenses while continuing not to work in order to comply fully with my immigration conditions. I nevertheless managed to borrow more money to instruct Philip Turpin and his team, specialist immigration and public law solicitors, to advise me and help me submit the Administrative Review.

His firm subsequently served a formal Pre Action Protocol letter challenging the Home Office's actions. The Home Office has maintained its position, and my legal team is now preparing to issue Judicial Review proceedings.

With no option to take out further loans and no permission to work while my immigration position is resolved through a process that could take up to two years, I am now asking for help to fund the legal costs so I can protect our home.

What Your Support Will Fund

Every contribution to this CrowdJustice campaign goes directly to our instructed legal team's client account to cover solicitor fees, barrister fees, court fees and formal representation.

Initial Target (£10,600): Covers the specialist solicitor and barrister work required to pursue the challenge through the Judicial Review permission stage, including the Administrative Review and Pre Action Protocol work, reviewing the Home Office's response, preparing the Judicial Review grounds and court filing fees.

Stretch Target (£28,600): If permission is granted, the additional £18,000 covers preparation for a substantive Judicial Review hearing, including further solicitor and barrister work, evidence, skeleton arguments and advocate representation.

If you can contribute, however much, you will be helping us challenge a decision that could determine whether Neo and I can protect the home and life we have built in the UK, while helping to hold the Home Office accountable and push for change that could protect others facing similar errors.

If you cannot donate, sharing our story with your network or media contacts can also make an enormous difference.

Thank you for standing with us for fairness, integrity and accountability.

Skye & Neo