Practitioners may be wondering where on earth the Home Office guidance on bail and detention has got to. It used to be housed in a section of the Home Office website entitled “Chapters 46 to 62: detention and removals“.

But as visitors to that section can now see, chapters 55 (on detention and temporary release), 55a (on detention of pregnant women) and 57 (on bail) have been recategorised. They now sit within the offender management section of the “Immigration Enforcement general instructions” section of the site.

Similarly, as the screenshot above shows, chapters 59 and 60 now live in the returns preparation section of the same collection. Chapters 53 and 56 have been withdrawn.

This appears to complete the process of changing over the organisation of all Immigration Enforcement general guidance documents. Where once they were grouped by range of chapters, they now sit within one of four thematic sections. (One glitch is that visitors to one of these four sections who cannot find what they need are instructed to “look in the ‘chapters’ sections”, which no longer exist.)

The reorganisation may well make sense in terms of how the documents are categorised, although lawyers have reported being unable to find them. Hopefully that is only a temporary teething trouble. Free Movement members having trouble tracking something down may find assistance in our forum.