No, my husband and I are UK citizens, salman.
I believe the fast processing for Pakistan applicants can be explained by the fact that they have allocated a separate team to process the Islamabad applications at London. No other nationality has such an arrangement there as far as I know. Presumably this is because of language barrier issues when checking background such as education and also because of the time difference.
I also think that London is processing very recent applications as fast as possible ahead of older applications because this is one way of getting their average processing time down. In all political situations, targets are all important and it doesn't look good for the VO if despite everything that has been done to streamline the process, their processing times are still rising.
LONDON UPDATE
My husband received a letter today from London VO requesting the following;
Updated Police checks for us both (although they were included originally)
New IM0008 form
Another letter from his company confirming his job as permanent (included originally)
Another copy of his valid TWP (included originally)
I think they are asking for the last two things again, despite having them in the original pack, because we are Category 2 and because of the fraud issues with AEO they obviously want to double check the job validity.
They also returned some documentation (University transcripts) so it is clear that they have already done some processing.
This letter was posted on the 29th July, which was 3 days after ECAS changed to IN PROCES
We have 60 days from posting to comply.
It has taken almost 2 weeks to reach him and of course he will have to post back everything from Canada, so we are getting our skates on now!
This development happened only a few days after a period of our address disappearing from ECAS for over a week and then returning, so that is further evidence that address absence is somehow linked to developments in a file at VO (although I still cannot understand
why this should be!)
CAIPS notes have still not yet arrived, but I will advise and give and interesting details when they do.