Congratulations, you finally got that dream business job overseas! Your bags are almost packed, your cat is in storage and your vinyl collection is at your parents (wait a sec, did you get that the wrong way round?). It’s never simple, it’s always a rush, and here’s another fly in the ointment: you’ve just found out that in order to issue your work permit the overseas visa authority has asked for your birth certificate and degree certificate to be legalised. What?
Welcome to the world of legalisation, the Foreign Office’s largest transactional service. Legalisation is the confirmation that a signature, seal or stamp on an official public document is genuine. It is a convention – the Hague convention of 1961 – which helps governments recognise and accept one another’s documents as long as the signature has been verified. This saves having to know what, for example, a birth certificate looks like in different countries around the world. The FCO legalises 480,000 documents per year.
So on you go to your favourite search engine, and from there to the GOV.UK legalisation pages. After a form is downloaded and filled in, some guidance scanned and an online payment is made your documents are in the post and your fingers are crossed. Will they turn it around it in time? (And come to think of it, were you supposed to send the original or a photocopy? And what was all that certification business about?)
Two days later, the documents arrive at the legalisation office. An officer checks your form, tries to decipher your rushed handwriting, and re-types the details into an internal database. Your degree and birth certificate are scrutinised, the signatures compared with those of public officials on the database. All looks good this time, so the payment is shipped and a certificate printed. This certificate, which is known in the trade as an “apostille”, is then stamped, which is known in the trade as “bonked”.
The apostille is then attached to your documents, and sent back to you by courier, your chosen method.
Your documents are now legalised and you can breathe easy – apart from that business about the cat.
As you may have spotted by now, this process is ripe for modernisation and – while an electronic version of the apostille is some distance away – there are plenty of opportunities for a digital service to improve the experience for users. We know from our research that users can find it stressful to have to get a document legalised, often at short notice, and crave a combination of speed, simplicity and clarity. In addressing these needs, we can also speed up processing for our staff. We can remove rekeying, simplify the steps involved by integrating data electronically, and radically improve the creaking workflow software currently in use. These measures are especially important at a time when recruitment is frozen, and the existing team need to handle a 6% year on year increase in demand – while meeting the ministerial targets of processing postal applications within 48 hours and premium service applications on the same day.
Consequently, in August we embarked upon building a new digital service for legalisation – in my next blog post I will discuss where we have got to a few weeks in, what we have tested and what we have learnt so far.
Follow Mark at @markbarlow