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Administrative review success rates

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The new Immigration Bill proposes removal of rights of appeal to an independent judge, to be replaced with  and replacement with ‘Administrative Review’ by one of its own staff. Immigration appeals have almost a 50% success rate according to the Government’s own figures:

Appeal success rate table

A recent Freedom of Information request I did reveals the following:

Between July 2012 & Jun 2013, 6096 Administrative reviews were resolved and out of that 1,077 were overturned. This represents a proportion of 18%.

This is why the Government wants to remove rights of appeal. It is the same reason the Government wants to reduce access to judicial review. It doesn’t like losing. The Government would rather reduce access to justice and remove independent scrutiny than improve decision making.

 

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Colin Yeo

Colin Yeo

Immigration and asylum barrister, blogger, writer and consultant at Garden Court Chambers in London and founder of the Free Movement immigration law website.

Comments

4 Responses

  1. I fthis new system were introduced and were to apply to cases already in the system, could that be another reason for the increasing lengths of time it seems to be taking to get cases listed at the higher levels, and to get answers about funding for JRs? In other words could the Government be hoping that some of the people who have already made applications would eventually lose their right to further appeals?

  2. I agree absolutely Colin, but can we have both please. It is frustrating for clients and advisors to have to waste so much time and money appealing decisions which would more sensibly be subjected to a quick review and then granted. I think in 5 of the last 8 appeals I presented the HO put up little or no defence. Of course, an AR decision would have to be quick to be of any use, but now it’s been mooted, perhaps we should support it as a sensible way to reduce the number of appeals. The currency policy of refusing to review decisions has become Kafkaesque, with HO caseworkers agreeing at times that decisions were mistaken, but having to tell applicants they are not allowed to correct their own mistakes.

  3. This policy or bill will undermine the good works of private law firms especially in london where most cases relate to immigration. The law may be discouraged to take new solictors thnew clieentserby collaapsing the law firms itself due to laco of new coient