The Upper Tribunal has allowed a judicial review brought by a Palestinian man after a nightmare scenario where the Home Office withdrew the refusal of his asylum claim the day before his appeal hearing, indicating that refugee status would be granted, only to later to resile from that position following...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! Last week saw further tragedy in the Channel with two separate incidents resulting in deaths. On Tuesday a woman died and a day later three people, including two children, died in an attempt to reach the UK. It is worth remembering that unaccompanied children are excluded from the new UK-France agreement. They cannot...
In a newly reported Hamid decision of the Upper Tribunal, a barrister has been referred to the Bar Standards Board for investigation following his use of a false citation generated by ChatGPT. The case is MS v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Professional Conduct: AI Generated Documents) Bangladesh...
The government has proposed changes to the early removal scheme for foreign national offenders in what is possibly the most significant overhaul to the deportation process since the changes made in the wake of the foreign prisoner ‘scandal’ in 2006. It comes hot on the heels of the expansion of the...
Immigration law is constantly changing and the Home Office updates its guidance documents accordingly. Sometimes you will need to look at an older version of the guidance that applied at a certain time but it is no longer on GOV.UK as it has been replaced with the new version. When...
The international sportsperson route was introduced in 2021 for elite and internationally established sportspeople and sports coaches to enter the UK. It replaced the previous system which involved applying under the now abolished Appendix T5 (Temporary Worker) Creative or Sporting Worker and Appendix T2 Sportsperson routes. The immigration rules for...
This is a new role. The Head of Casework will be the second most senior member of the Legal Team, working collaboratively with the Legal Director. They combine high-quality immigration representation with departmental management responsibilities, including supervision of legal staff, safeguarding, compliance, and billing. Under the oversight and direction of...
The Home Office can impose a mandatory refusal period, also known as a re-entry ban, on people who have previously breached immigration law or used deception in their application for leave. Refusal periods can last one year, two years, five years or ten years. Generally speaking, and except for some...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! Personally I feel that Grant Shapps’ record as the best Home Secretary we have had in the past 15+ years remains intact. What a legacy though – in her last week in the job, Yvette Cooper closed the refugee family reunion route. A...
The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill is at committee stage in the House of Lords. The Bill as first introduced has several government amendments made as it completes its passage through Parliament, and so I have detailed those below. I look only at those put forward by the government...
Last weekend’s reshuffle saw Yvette Cooper replaced as Home Secretary by Shabana Mahmood, who was previously the Lord Chancellor. In addition, Angela Eagle, previously the Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum, and Seema Malhotra, previously the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Migration and Citizenship, have both been moved...
Let’s face it, August was a rough one and hopefully most of you managed to escape it for a summer holiday at some point, in which case you definitely need Sonia and Barry to help catch you up! The UK announced its new arrangements to return people arriving across the...
As trailed earlier in the week, the refugee family reunion route will be “suspended” as of 3pm today as set out in the statement of changes just published. The explanatory memorandum describes this as “introducing a temporary pause to Appendix Family Reunion (Sponsors with Protection), as we undertake a full...
If you’ve been trying to keep up with the UK’s ever-shifting work visa landscape, you’re not alone. Over the years, the government’s method of defining which jobs are in shortage has gone through quite the transformation—from the original Shortage Occupation List to the newer Immigration Salary List and now the...
Update: this route is currently suspended and new applications cannot be made. Family reunion applications submitted before 3pm tomorrow, including those currently under appeal, will continue to be assessed under these rules. This post is intended for refugees (including those with humanitarian protection), their families and their friends trying to...
The National Audit Office has published a report on the Afghanistan Response Route which was set up following the government’s data leak (for background you can read our initial write up as well as this newsletter). The report looks at the key events and decisions which led to the creation...
The Court of Appeal has overturned the grant of interim relief in the case of the hotel in Epping where the council sought, and at first obtained, an order for the people being accommodated in the hotel to be moved out by 12 September 2025. The Home Secretary succeeded in...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! Would it even be a music festival without at least one Home Office related line up change? Anyway, this newsletter was written on Wednesday last week because I am currently making my way home to a hot shower, here’s hoping that the end...
A “returning resident” is a resident of the United Kingdom with settled status who returns to the country after a lengthy absence abroad. Ordinarily, when a person refers to “returning residents” they might be talking about a temporary resident who leaves for a short time, for example on holiday or...
The Home Secretary has been ordered to provide asylum accommodation to a man with mental health needs who has continued to be held in immigration detention for 15 weeks after he was first granted conditional bail by the First-tier Tribunal. The High Court also granted permission for judicial review on...
The mantra of “safe and legal routes” is regularly repeated by the government when justifying increasingly draconian legislation in an attempt to prevent refugees from travelling to the UK under their own steam. The argument is that refugees should use these safe and legal routes instead of arriving in small...
In this article we look at how foreign Esports (competitive video gaming) competitors can use the visitor route to participate in UK competitions and what the rules say about earning prize money. We also look at options for gamers looking to apply their trade in the UK on a long-term...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! A lot has happened in the last week. I am going to focus on statistics because there are some important omissions which are really key to everything else that is going on. In 2022/23 72% of Home Office decisions were passing their own...
In this briefing we will take a look at what is really going on with the main features of the contemporary asylum system: arrivals, the backlog, detention, removal and resettlement. The focus is on what caused the backlog and what consequences will flow from the large number of decisions being...
This is a detailed explainer of the process for people in France to apply to come to the UK under the new UK/European Applicant Transfer Scheme as set out in Appendix UK/European Applicant Transfer Scheme and version 1 of the guidance “UK/European Applicant Transfer Scheme” dated 7 August 2025. This...
Bill Gates once said that your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. If the same applies to the Home Office staff who have the unenviable job of fielding complaints about their colleagues from irate migrants and their lawyers, their enlightenment must rival that of any Renaissance polymath....
The quarterly immigration and asylum statistics covering the period April to June 2025 have been published by the Home Office. A couple of notable points on the asylum front is the increase in Palestinians arriving in the UK across the Channel and some fairly suspicious silence from the Home Office...
The First-tier Tribunal will re-hear the appeal of a man who received a letter from the Home Office refusing his asylum, and then a few days later a biometric resident permit reflecting a grant of refugee leave. The Upper Tribunal said that the biometric residence permit is not a grant...
Epping Council has succeeded in obtaining an interim injunction to prevent the use of the Bell Hotel as asylum accommodation pending the final outcome of the proceedings. The case is Epping Forest District Council v Somani Hotels Ltd [2025] EWHC 2183 (KB). This is a planning law case so don’t...
Anybody over the age of ten who applies for registration or naturalisation as a British citizen needs to meet the so-called “good character requirement”. This is a mandatory requirement set out in the British Nationality Act 1981. Where a person is deemed by the Home Office not to be “of...
Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter! Shortly after the immigration white paper was published, two petitions against the doubling of the settlement period from five to ten years in two specific routes hit the 100,000 threshold required for the government to consider holding a debate on the issue. Keeping...
First-tier Tribunal judges can consider applications for permission to appeal their own decisions under processes introduced in January this year but seemingly not communicated to practitioners until much later. The decision says that “the change in practice was communicated to stakeholders at the Immigration and Asylum Chamber Improvement Group on...
In a decision made in April 2024 but only made public now, the High Court quashed decisions made by the Secretary of State of Defence that the claimants were not eligible under the Afghan Response Route because, as a judge and a journalist, they did not work in one of...
This article looks at some common practical issues which arise during the imposition of immigration bail conditions by the First-tier Tribunal, such as the requirement for the probation service to approve a bail address and issues around schedule 10 accommodation. This is of increasing importance given the current government has...
An Afghan man and his family have lost their challenge to refusal of their application for resettlement under the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy. The case is R (AFA & Ors) v Secretary of State for Home Department & Anor [2025] EWHC 2143 (Admin). Before the Taliban took over, the...
