Complete lottery and farce!
I have to agree – I don’t understand why they don’t distribute the work to applicants ‘local office’ at time of application, for example Peterborough office isn’t far from me and I had to send my documents to Liverpool. Surely the online application can look at the post code and shuffle the applications out accordingly instead of as it seems is happening having the majority of documents go to one office, creating issues all round – but it’s Government offices, they don’t do common sense!
Also there is no excuse for them giving poor information – everything they do is governed by a series of guides which tells them how to deal with everything (you can google for them). Information coming out of HMPO should be correct and accurate first time.