Inspection of fee waiver applications notes improvement in processing times, concerns about decision quality

The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration’s report “An inspection of the Home Office’s management of fee waiver applications  (August 2024 – November 2024)” has been published, and as always there are various interesting bits such as what on earth was going on with those tokens last year and the Home Office view on student “abuse” of fee waiver applications.

This report is timely, given the announcement that application fees will increase yet again on 9 April 2025, including an increase to Appendix FM applications less than a year after the last hike. I focus on in-country human rights based fee waivers in this post so do assume that is what I am talking about unless stated otherwise. All types of fee waivers were reviewed as part of the inspection.

Between June 2023 and June 2024 the total number of outstanding fee waiver applications increased from 12,047 to 33,971, largely driven by an increase in in-country applications. Unsurprisingly, many stakeholders drew a link between the huge application fees and an increase in the number of fee waivers requested. The increase in the immigration health surcharge from £624 per year to £1,035 per year took place on 6 February 2024 and the chart below shows the immediate impact that had on the number of fee waiver applications being made.

Another stakeholder made a really good point which is that the raised application fees:

must also increase the complexity of fee waiver decision-making, since higher application fees will affect more families and individuals in work with moderate incomes, whose financial affairs and financial records will involve larger sums of money and often be more complicated than, say, the average unlawfully present person entirely supported by Social Services. 

Timeliness

Processing times for in-country applications increased from 86 days in August 2023 to a peak of 168 days in June 2024. In September 2024 the average processing time was 69 days. Stakeholders raised with inspectors the problems these delays cause people, in particular the difficulties caused by being on section 3C leave.

The report also provided an explanation for what was causing issues with fee tokens last year. The token is a code that is sent when a fee waiver application is successful and you in put that into the leave application to be able to submit it without payment. These are apparently generated when the fee waiver application is made, rather than when the decision is made and they expired after 180 days. The decision making delays meant that some expired tokens were issued to applicants.

This was initially difficult for applicants and their legal representatives to sort out with no clear way to contact the relevant team and obviously the potential consequences particularly for a client with existing leave are huge, as they risked losing their section 3C leave. The tokens are now issued with validity for a year and a ”token issues inbox” was created which at one point had 900 queries, but was welcomed by stakeholders as a way to raise concerns quickly. 

Staffing

In February 2024 staff were deployed to tackle the fee waiver backlog and this was down to 12,500 in September 2024. Home Office forecasting through to July 2025 shows (again, unsurprisingly) that the number of in-country fee waiver applications is expected to continue to rise.

The report said that it is “clear from these projections that the ‘core’ team is too small to stay on top of intake and prevent the WiP from growing” and it is unsustainable to continue to rely on borrowing staff from other departments. Staffing in teams dealing with other fee waiver applications has not been a problem.

Guidance

Only one third of caseworkers dealing with in-country fee waivers considered their guidance “good” or “excellent” and caseworkers said that they rarely referred to it as they found it difficult to navigate. Instead they would ask “technical specialists” for advice, but reported that advice was not always consistent.

Workflow and case progression

Where a person has previously been granted a fee waiver and/or is in receipt of means tested benefits they will be triaged for a faster decision with less scrutiny, although with the affordability test still being applied.

In June 2024 caseworkers also started prioritising applications from students because of “a perceived abuse of the fee waiver system” by people on a student visa looking to obtain section 3C leave. This was apparently based on data from one week in March 2024 when there were 109 such applications refused, and “only a small number went on to make a paid family and private life visa application within ten days of the refusal, and where 50 of the 109 went on to make a paid immigration application in another capacity”. This affected grant rates, for example there were 5,248 applications decided between 10 June and 19 July 2024 and only 78 (1.5%) were accepted.

Inspectors raised concerns about the evidence base being insufficient to justify allegations of abuse, as well as the lack of an Equality Impact Assessment, particularly given 85% to 90% of the student cohort were Indian nationals and there was no Ministerial Authorisation to permit discrimination for immigration purposes.

Evidential requirements

Inspectors “raised concerns about the efficiency, effectiveness, and consistency” of the process where caseworker write out to request further information from applicants (also a big problem in change of conditions applications as highlighted in this recent report).

Assessment of fee waiver applications

A particular bugbear of mine is the reference in the fee waiver guidance to asylum support rates as the allowable amounts for essential living needs, so it was good to see this:

An operational manager responsible for in-country fee waivers told inspectors that policy advised them that the asylum support rates were “outdated”. However, a policy officer responsible for in-country and overseas fee waiver guidance told inspectors that they suspected the move away from the use of the asylum support payment rates by operational teams when assessing affordability was because “something that had evolved.”

The reference should be removed from the guidance entirely, it is obviously unreasonable to expect someone who is working and earning a salary to be living at asylum support rates, which are practically destitution level, just so that they can try to pay Home Office application fees.

Quality assurance and decision quality

From June 2024 the Home Office temporarily dropped quality standards in order to be able to more quickly sign off newly transferred caseworkers as competent. Inspectors looked at 72 in-country decisions made between August 2023 and July 2024 and found several areas of concern:

Almost half of the decision letters contained errors, ranging from minor spelling and grammatical mistakes to more serious errors, including failure to delete stock paragraphs and the inclusion of wording that did not apply (so that in two cases both ‘accept’ and ‘refusal’ information was included in the same letter), and informing the applicant wrongly that they were liable to removal from the UK when they had extant leave.

Recommendations

The Chief Inspector recommended that the Home Office:

1. Develop a workforce plan for in-country fee waiver applications to avoid backlogs.

2. Formalise regular (at least quarterly) meetings of senior managers and caseworkers from the three fee waiver teams to share information and promote best practice and consistency, and to flag and manage risks.

3. Create a more exacting ‘quality score marking’ system for use with fee waiver caseworkers that reinforces the importance of eliminating all errors, giving more weight than hitherto to correct spelling, grammar, and content of correspondence, alongside correct decision outcomes.

4. Overhaul how the quality and consistency of the work of fee waiver caseworkers (not solely decision outcomes) is managed.

5. Review and document the lawful basis for storing Equifax reports on Home Office systems, including the retention of such reports beyond the point where a fee waiver decision has been issued, and with particular regard to third-party data that is unconnected with the fee waiver application.

6. Ensure that, where significant changes to fee waiver policy and processes are proposed, including but not limited to the triaging of applications by cohort or characteristic(s), these are subject to an Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) to ensure that they are compliant with the Home Office’s Public Sector Equality Duty, and determine whether Ministerial Authorisation should be sought to cover instances of direct discrimination.

7. a. From April 2025, introduce a service level agreement (SLA) for child citizenship and overseas fee waiver processing times, taking account of the fact that both have been relatively stable for at least 12 months in terms of application volumes, resourcing, and decision times, and there are no reasons to think that this will change.

b. Commit to introducing an SLA for in-country fee waivers when the in-country fee waiver backlog has been reduced to a frictional level and processing times have been stable for six months.

8. Develop an external stakeholder engagement strategy that covers in-country, child citizenship, and overseas fee waivers.

In its response, the Home Office has accepted five of the recommendations and partially accepted the other three. 

Conclusion

The interim Chief Inspector, David Bolt, has just had his appointment extended for up to a further three months while recruitment of his successor is finalised. I think his comments on the wider implications of his findings are worth setting out in full:

None of these recommendations should be controversial, and all of them are achievable. The need for each is evidenced in this inspection and they relate directly to the management of fee waiver applications. However, the underlying issues – shortages of trained and experienced staff, problems with record-keeping and with the quality and timeliness of decisions, the management of backlogs, silo working, and poor communication and engagement – go much wider, as previous inspections have shown. I am therefore looking to the Home Office to reflect on these recommendations and to adapt and implement them wherever else within the Migration and Borders System they are relevant.