Colin's case was not the usual one. After eighteen years in Indonesia he had built a business, and when the family decided to return to the UK he could meet the minimum income requirement without difficulty.
The problem was who counted.
His wife's mother had lived with them since their first child was born. She had raised the children while both parents worked, in an arrangement that is entirely ordinary in Indonesia and was, in every practical sense, the shape of their family. She was in her seventies. There was no one else to care for her, and no version of the move in which the children simply stopped seeing the person who had brought them up.
The adult dependent relative rules are extremely narrow. They are designed for cases where an applicant requires long-term personal care that cannot be obtained in their own country — a test that a healthy grandmother in a country with functioning healthcare does not meet, however central she is to a household.
Colin was told, correctly, that the rules did not provide for his situation. The family stayed in Indonesia.
They have since made their peace with it, and Colin is careful not to present himself as a victim. His point is narrower and, he thinks, harder to dismiss: the rules embed a specific and quite recent idea of what a family is, and apply it to British citizens who built their families in places where that idea does not hold.
"I'm British," he says. "My children are British. We just organised our family the way everyone around us does."
Colin contributed to BOVF's submission on family reunification ahead of the 2026 Early Day Motion.
Case studies on this site are written from the experiences BOVF members have shared with us and are presented in anonymised form. Names and identifying details have been changed.
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