Presumably because everything is going so well with the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and the Rwanda Bill, it appears that the government is setting its sights back on the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, in particular the provisions not yet in force around priority removal notices and accelerated detained appeals.

The Tribunal Procedure Committee carried out a consultation on the necessary rules changes in 2022 before the implementation of the relevant provisions of the Nationality Borders Act 2022 were abandoned when the Illegal Migration Bill was published in March 2023. Minutes of the Tribunal Procedure Committee meeting on 7 March 2024 disclose that the policy lead in the Ministry of Justice’s Illegal Migration team has contacted the committee to ask for a “preliminary view as to the potential minimum timeframes for delivering rule changes pursuant to the Nationality, Asylum and Borders Act” and whether the committee “would consider it necessary to consult again on the new rules”.

Following the previous consultation, the committee published the draft rules alongside the consultation response, even though the changes had been abandoned for the time being. Apparently no changes are being proposed to those rules. Despite that, the committee considered that the length of time since the last consultation was a “significant” factor that may mean that a new consultation is needed.

The committee said that a new consultation paper would need to “factor in any new considerations including the impact of any other immigration-related legislation such as the Illegal Migration Act 2024 and the Rwanda Bill 2024”. The committee said that they would prefer to wait until government policy has been settled (good luck with that!).

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