Just a quick note to flag something up that emerged from the forum a couple of weeks ago. A friend of the blog was kind enough to share a mine of policy documents obtained by Freedom of Information request and, not only that, but the friend also OCR (optical character recognition) scanned them so that they are searchable. Details here and here (forum members only).

The snipper is that the evidential flexibility policy applied to entry clearance cases just as much as in-country ones and there is a specific instruction to entry clearance posts that says as much. I can think of at least one application for judicial review in which I would have pleaded this point had the policy not been a secret one of which I and the client were unaware. That’s the problem with secrecy – it hides unlawful behaviour.