Three individual claimants have succeeded in a judicial review claiming that they had been unlawfully accommodated at the former RAF base in Wethersfield. The court also held that the Home Office had unlawfully breached the Public Sector Equality Duty. The case is TG & Ors v Secretary of State for...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! Committee stage of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill continued last week, and the two amendments that had been put forward to reverse the recent changes to the good character guidance were debated on Thursday. Pete Wishart MP put it well when...
The Home Secretary has succeeded in an appeal where she argued that those with deportation orders or proceedings were lawfully excluded from a concession allowing certain victims of trafficking to be considered for discretionary leave under the more favourable provisions in place before 30 January 2023. The case is Secretary...
Job title: Senior Legal Education Officer Location: Right to Remain Office, Bethnal Green, London. Salary: £46,000 – 48,000 (inclusive of London weighting) per annum FTE, pro-rated, depending on the skills and experience. Hours: Full time or 0.8 FTE (28 hours per week) Contract: Permanent, 6 month probationary period Reporting to:...
The Upper Tribunal has dismissed a challenge to a refusal of further leave under Appendix Representative of an Overseas Business on the grounds that overseas ownership of the UK based subsidiary is required from incorporation and not just at the point of application, and that the Home Secretary was entitled...
Ahead of the government’s (apparently fairly imminent now) Immigration White Paper, the National Audit Office has published a report looking at how the Home Office manages the Skilled Worker route. In particular, they looked at whether the Home Office has an effective approach to adjusting the entry requirements to respond...
Despite the expansion of the Legal Services Act in 2022 to allow for pro bono costs to be awarded in tribunals, many legal professionals remain unaware of the scheme. Pro bono costs orders are an untapped resource within the legal profession, with unfulfilled potential to help close the funding gap...
Hot on the heels of the latest immigration and asylum statistics, we now have the tribunals’ figures for October to December 2024 and can see that the First-tier Tribunal’s asylum appeal backlog has increased from 34,234 outstanding cases at the end of September 2024 to 41,987 cases by the end...
A claimant seeking compensation under the Windrush Compensation Scheme after being denied entry to the UK and removed from the UK in July 1999 will have his application reconsidered after the High Court quashed the Home Office’s refusal. The case is R (Lee) v Secretary of State for the Home...
The latest statement of changes to the immigration rules has been published, accompanied by an explanatory memorandum and a ministerial statement. A visa regime has been imposed on Trinidad and Tobago with immediate effect, I am pretty sure you can guess why. Details on that and many of the other...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! There were reports of widespread issues with eVisas last week as accounts again seemed to be linked to the wrong identities in yet another data breach. It remains unclear what is causing these issues or when and how it is expected to be resolved. In the meantime, it was...
Claiming asylum is an important human right backed by the United Nations Refugee Convention and recognised by countries around the world. In order to make this right a reality in practice, countries like the UK have set up systems by which people must apply for asylum. In this way, asylum...
The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal against the refusal of an EEA residence card as an extended family member where further education was considered not to be an essential living need in circumstances where the appellant had applied for a working holiday maker visa before instead continuing with...
The February podcast is here! We kick off with Sonia briefly summarising the recently published statistics for 2024. There was then a lot to cover on asylum with several case updates and of course the recent Home Office changes to the good character requirements. Barry was thrilled to be able...
This article explains how to make a successful change of conditions application where a person needs to lift the no recourse to public funds restriction (NRPF) from their grant of leave. This article is written for applicants as well as for the lawyers and advisors who may be assisting in...
The High Court has quashed a decision by the Home Office to refuse a trafficking claim on the grounds that the person had been kidnapped, which the decision maker said could not meet the trafficking definition. The case is R (AAM) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025]...
The Ministry of Justice has announced increases to court and tribunal fees, to take effect for applications made on or after 1 April 2025. I have pulled out the ones most applicable to immigration and asylum work below, but do check the full list if you are making an application...
Many UK immigration categories impose a requirement that the visa holder must not be outside the UK for more than 180 days in any 12-month period — that is, if the person wants to apply for indefinite leave to remain. The good news is that this rule doesn’t apply to...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! Committee stage of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill continues this week. An amendment has been proposed by the SNP’s Pete Wishart (on page 8), which would ensure that illegal entry to the UK is ignored when considering the good character requirement in...
The latest instalment of the litigation surrounding the family separated during a Channel crossing last year has been determined by the Family Court. We have previously covered the interim relief decision by the Court of Appeal as well as the Upper Tribunal’s decision in the judicial review. This case is...
As anticipated in my article published in September 2024, the Home Office immigration statistics published on 27 February 2025 demonstrated a huge fall in the grant rate for Afghan asylum claims in the last three months of 2024. This follows the change in the Home Office policy position in its...
Following the announcement in December 2024 that people would be able to use expired biometric residence permits for travel until the end of March, the Minister for Migration and Citizenship has announced an extension: This allows people with a biometric residence permit (BRP) or EUSS biometric residence card (BRC) that...
In two joined appeals, the Supreme Court has held that a successful challenge to a deprivation decision will mean that British citizenship was retained throughout the period from the date the deprivation order was made until the date of the appeal decision, but the effect of the deprivation order will...
The Court of Appeal has returned an appeal to the First-tier Tribunal to be determined for a third time after a series of errors made in a First-tier Tribunal decision was not dealt with by the Upper Tribunal. The court was clearly unimpressed, stating that “If the UT had carried...
The latest quarterly immigration and asylum statistics have been published and nothing in them felt like much of a surprise really. We know that the asylum grant rate has been dropping, the number of health and care visas dropping, student numbers dropping and we have seen these trends continue in...
The High Court has ruled that three Home Office decisions, each of which refused the claimant’s request for reinstated trafficking support via the Modern Slavery Victim Care Contract, were unlawful. Judgment was handed down in R (ETX) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 294 (Admin) on...
On 7 February the High Court gave judgment in the case of R (oao) APD v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 246 (Admin). This was the first judicial treatment of section 4L of the British Nationality Act 1981, which was inserted by the Nationality and Borders...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! With no sign of any movement from the government on the ban on citizenship for those who have arrived in the UK without permission, despite further pressure, it looks like it will end up being lawyers who hopefully get this policy overturned. We have also started...
HM Inspectorate of Prisons has published a report following an unannounced inspection of the short-term holding facilities at the France-UK borders that took place in November 2024. These facilities are in France but are run by the UK and are used to detain people while considering whether to admit, grant...
In our latest write up on the people seeking asylum who were on Diego Garcia there was mention of the case of KP, who was excluded from the arrangements to bring most people to the UK as he had criminal convictions, although he had also been recognised as being in...
Companies like TrustedHousesitters have recently hit the news following a number of incidents whereby some of its international members tried to enter the UK as a visitor in order to take advantage of an agreed-upon housesitting arrangement but were instead denied entry into the country. With the rise of this...
The Home Secretary has succeeded in an appeal to the Court of Appeal where the First-tier Tribunal’s decision was overturned for a failure to provide sufficient reasons for departing from a country guidance case, only for the Upper Tribunal to then fall into the same error. The case is Secretary...
A Sudanese refugee has been unsuccessful in his Court of Appeal challenge to an age assessment by a local authority. The case is R (AI) v West Berkshire Council [2025] EWCA Civ 136. The appellant is a Sudanese national who claimed asylum in October 2021. On arrival in the UK,...
The “no recourse to public funds” condition is imposed on grants of limited leave to enter or remain with the effect of prohibiting the person holding that leave from accessing certain defined public funds, set out at paragraph 6 of the immigration rules. A person who deliberately claims public funds despite such...
Delays in the Home Office’s processing of change of conditions applications (used to lift the no recourse to public funds restriction from a person’s grant of leave) are a serious problem and a rare example of where the Home Office is regularly on the losing side of litigation challenging delays...
