On 10 April 2024 the Home Office introduced a fee waiver process for those applying to extend their leave in Appendix Hong Kong BN(O) however the new process introduces barriers that do not exist for other routes and will be insurmountable for some applicants, through no fault of their own....
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! On the asylum front, things are still relatively quiet but this is very much the calm before the storm, as the Rwanda Bill is expected to pass next week. We will then hopefully at least get some clarity as to how the government intends to...
In recent months two cohorts of young people, those granted ‘Calais leave’ and those granted leave under section 67 of the Immigration Act 2016, have begun to reach the end of five years’ limited leave to remain. The immigration rules currently provide a route to either further limited leave or...
The Home Office has updated its guidance on voluntary returns, now re-named voluntary departures which now includes the possibility of sending those who agree to a safe third country. Although not explicitly named in the guidance, the intention is clearly to try to get people to agree to go to...
As the government’s Rwanda plan continues to court controversy, there is one area of their policy which by their measures could be seen to be succeeding: their efforts to stop Albanians from seeking refuge in the UK. Since 2019, the Migrant and Refugee Children’s Legal Unit at Islington Law Centre...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! Apparently since 7 October 2023 every entry clearance application made from Gaza has been rejected by the Home Office. That was the position up to the date of disclosure in this judicial review by a Palestinian refugee trying to bring his family to the UK, and there is no reason to...
A few days before the two-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the UK government announced a series of sweeping changes to the Ukraine schemes, giving just four hours’ notice of their implementation. Among the most significant changes are the closure of the Ukraine Family Scheme, and a new...
In Zhou & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2024] EWCA Civ 81 the Court of Appeal has re-affirmed the high threshold for challenging delays in decision-making by the Home Secretary and the scope of any appeal against a refusal to grant permission for judicial review. Background...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! I was pleased to see one of the three new asylum backlogs get some media coverage at the weekend. I have been baffled as to why the government created this situation ever since the Illegal Migration Act was first published in July last year. Essentially, they seem to have...
The Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS) is a fee levied on the majority of UK visa applications. The Immigration Health Surcharge is on top of other Home Office immigration fees and designed to land in a different government pocket. Also sometimes known as the NHS surcharge, it essentially adds £1,035 per...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! A lot less happened last week, which makes a nice change. The first thing I wanted to flag up is this Guardian article in which the Home Office said that it has been wrongly sending letters threatening people with being sent to Rwanda. As detailed in...
Appendix Children was published in October 2023 and consolidates most of the rules for child dependents of parents on points-based immigration routes which were previously spread out across the individual categories. It also covers children applying in their own right in points-based categories that allow for that, such as the...
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...
Significantly, a considerable number of British subjects who were then living in the United Kingdom free from residence conditions were excluded from automatic acquisition of patrial status. Page contentsAutomatic acquisition of indefinite leave to remainAutomatic acquisition of limited leave to remainExcluded from statusLong term consequences Automatic acquisition of indefinite leave...
The UK is falling significantly short of international labour standards. In fact, the government’s labour migration policy and wider hostile environment actively produces risks of labour exploitation. In 2022, labour exploitation was the most commonly reported form of adult modern slavery cases recorded on the National Referral Mechanism, amounting to...
The Home Office has changed the immigration rules and the guidance on making applications to the EU Settlement Scheme, taking a far more restrictive approach to late applications than has been the case previously. The Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner (OISC) has updated its guidance to reflect these changes...
Here, we look at the practicalities involved in getting a good medico-legal report. We have previously explained what a medico-legal report is and that article should be read alongside this one. These reports can be a game changer in cases involving vulnerable clients, but in the current climate it is...
Page contentsAssisting unlawful migrationFacilitating a breach of immigration lawHelping an asylum seeker enter the UKPiloting a rubber dinghy across the English ChannelFailure to comply with immigration controlThe 1971 Act offencesNon-cooperation with deportation or removalTraffickingUN definition of traffickingThe legislation in England and WalesThe legislation in Scotland and Northern IrelandEmployersDefinitionsSentencingLandlordsDefinitionsDefenceAgentsSentencing Assisting unlawful...
This course was published in October 2023. In recent years, judicial review – the primary mechanism for challenging the lawfulness of decisions made by public bodies – has been of ever increasing importance to immigration practitioners. This has been due to restrictions on or outright removal of statutory appeal rights,...
Judicial review is the primary mechanism for challenging the lawfulness of decisions made by public bodies. In recent years, it has been of ever increasing importance to immigration practitioners, due to restrictions on or outright removal of statutory appeal rights; and the expansion of hostile environment policies and powers affecting...
Theresa May’s unironically named book, The Abuse of Power, reveals that even now, five years later, she still does not understand what caused the Windrush scandal. She blames Clement Attlee’s government, other governments over the intervening years and issues a classic non-apology. It was anyone’s fault but hers. “At the...
Judicial review is the primary mechanism for challenging the lawfulness of decisions made by public bodies. It is of increasing importance to immigration practitioners. This is due to restrictions on or outright removal of statutory appeal rights, and the expansion of hostile environment policies and powers affecting people subject to...
Job title: Legal and Parliamentary Officer Organisation: Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) Duration: Permanent Location: Hybrid / London Annual leave: 25 days per annum Salary: £32,000 to £35,000 depending on skills and experience Working Hours: 35 hours per week, plus a lunch break (NB evening working is required to attend...
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the disembarking of the passengers on board the ship the HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948. Even now, five years after the Windrush scandal broke, many well-informed and well-intentioned journalists, writers and policy-makers do not really grasp the true legal...
This month Colin and Sonia cover the Illegal Migration Bill and its potential consequences, the right way to go about tackling the asylum backlog, Colin’s suggestion of a new British Citizenship Act, the resumption of hostile environment bank account closures, the latest caselaw and some business immigration issues. If you...
This month we talk more about the Illegal Migration Bill and its potential consequences, the right way to go about tackling the asylum backlog, Colin’s suggestion of a new British Citizenship Act, the resumption of hostile environment bank account closures, we run through a load of cases and end by...
On 6 April 2023, the Home Office started data sharing with the financial sector again. This was foreshadowed in a speech by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on 13 December 2022. Sections 40A to 40H of the Immigration Act 2014 requires banks to carry out immigration checks on all customers with...
The aim of the hostile environment is to make life as difficult as possible for undocumented migrants in the UK. To achieve this, successive governments have required hospitals, banks and landlords to carry out document checks, preventing those without lawful status from accessing essential services such as housing and healthcare....
The government’s new Illegal Migration Bill is the latest in the long line of attempts to deal with refugee arrivals by making life difficult for them. In so doing, it sidesteps the real issues, the reality of both the facts of the refugee issue in the UK and where our...
This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced Immigration Solicitor to work on a project dedicated to increasing the capacity for legal representation within the sector by setting up a new, innovative legal aid casework service within RLS. We are looking for an experienced Solicitor to build RLS’s legal aid...
We live in what some have called ‘multi-status Britain’, a country in which discrimination is baked into a social, economic and racial hierarchy based on different forms of legal status. With British citizenship, other forms of British nationality, indefinite leave to remain, permanent residence, the five year route to settlement,...
The High Court has ruled that the government’s second attempt to produce an immigration exemption to the Data Protection Act 2018 is still incompatible with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Only a week after the hearing, the judgment in R (on the application of the3million & Anor) v...
When employers apply for and are granted a licence to sponsor workers, they make a pledge to accept all the duties of sponsorship, and the Home Office can take compliance action when they consider that a sponsor has failed to uphold their duties or otherwise poses a risk to immigration...
This month marks twenty years since the signing of one of the most significant Franco-British treaties in the last 50 years, the Le Touquet treaty. Whilst Le Touquet, a seaside town on the northern French coast one hour from Calais, may conjure images of calm beaches where Macron escapes Paris...
Job Title: Training Manager Organisation: Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) Duration: Permanent Location: Hybrid / London Reports to: Chief Executive Responsible for: Administration Officer Annual leave: 25 days per annum plus bank holidays and Christmas closure period Salary: £34,000 – £37,000 depending on experience Working Hours: 35 hours per week....
Yesterday, the Home Office published a number of reviews of internal data and processes relating to the hostile environment. The reviews include a range of data, including figures like 450,000 people being flagged as unauthorised migrants or in breach of visa conditions between 2014 and 2018. And moves on from...
The Financial Times is reporting today that “around 141,000” EU citizens had their digital status updated to “refused” last month. Their applications were previously refused by the Home Office but for some reason their online status had not been updated. Online status is used by employers, landlords, banks, the NHS,...
In a judgment handed down last Friday, the High Court has cast doubt on the British citizenship status of children born in the United Kingdom before 2 October 2000 to EU citizens who did not at that time possess indefinite leave to remain. The case is R (on the application of...
One of the measures announced by Rishi Sunak in his asylum statement on 13 December 2022 was the re-starting of hostile environment immigration checks on bank accounts. These checks were introduced by the Immigration Act 2016 but were paused by Sajid Javid in 2018 when he was Home Secretary. There...
Rishi Sunak announced yesterday a number of measures to address the government’s self-made asylum backlog. The tone of Sunak’s statement was more measured than the sometimes rather unhinged rhetoric to which we have become accustomed, although he still introduced the topic as being about “illegal immigration”. There were no attacks...
