Thank you for the opportunity to address that issue.
When the spousal cases were transferred to London back in 2014, some of those cases were already quite old in terms of the time they had sat in inventory. They weren't left behind; it simply was difficult for us to process them in Islamabad because of the circumstances there. As we brought them to London and we began processing them, already some of them had been waiting for some time, so that by the time we issued those visas, waiting times appeared to be very long. As we worked our way through that caseload, those who followed also had to wait.
Now that we've worked our way into a situation where we're almost able to begin processing files as soon as they arrive in the office, most clients will notice quite an improvement in processing times over those clients who applied two or four years ago. That said, there are complexities inherent in these applications that make some of them go more slowly than we would like them to go.