In the aftermath of the Windrush scandal, Rudd said she was “concerned that the Home Office has become too concerned with policy and strategy and sometimes loses sight of the individual.” Deciding to fast-track cases which got publicity was Rudd’s way of addressing individual failures, but lawyers and judges say there is a systemic problem that urgently needs to be addressed.



Exactly 50% of all Home Office decisions that are appealed in the immigration tribunal are now overturned, the highest proportion on record. The situation has even prompted judges to speak out about the poor quality of Home Office decision-making — and the waste of public resources in pursuing court cases.

A surge in the number of controversial immigration cases reaching the media coincides with two acts of parliament that drastically reduced people’s ability to challenge Home Office decision-making. The first, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO), took public funding for a lawyer away from almost all immigration cases not relating to asylum or detention. Then the Immigration Act 2014 took away the right to appeal a decision in most cases, leaving people with no means of challenging the Home Office.

Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights programme director, has closely observed Home Office decision-making since 1999. He said: “Removing appeal rights has contributed to the fact that for so many more people there isn’t a way of redressing a wrong decision by the Home Office. Years ago you’d go to a lawyer, receive legal aid if you couldn’t afford that lawyer, and exercise your right to appeal. Now that’s been stripped away.

“Even if you retained your appeal right, you lost your legal aid right. What happened, particularly between 2013 and 2015, really deprived many people of any means of challenging what the Home Office had done to them. So what can they do? Try to get the interest of their local MP or journalists. You essentially try to get publicity for your case because there’s nothing left.”

BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this year that the number of people given public funding to fight an immigration case is lower than in any previous quarter on record. Just 6,609 people were given legal help or representation in their immigration case in the three months to September last year.

Valdez-Symonds says the handling of high-profile cases serves to highlight how poor the service is for ordinary people. “This different approach for people who’ve managed to draw significant public and media attention to their plight leaves most people caught in the immigration system absolutely nowhere. It leaves them in detention, on the streets, suffering huge distress, thrown out of the country that’s their home. This is resources being committed to PR not being committed to making sure people’s rights are respected.

“Things have got so bad, and been so badly exposed for them, that it would be impossible for them to say with a straight face ‘we don’t make bad decisions’. They acknowledge now that they make bad decisions but are trying to contain how widespread it is recognised as being. Their primary concern is not that the Home Office is treating people with respect and fairness.

“Instead of creating a system where officials care for people’s rights — enabling them to establish the status they have or are entitled to — you have a system where officials are concerned about protecting themselves, their department and the aims and targets of a department which is carefree about, even wants to disrupt people’s lives.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “There is no immigration and citizenship casework team which works specifically on high-profile cases.

“The cases cited were dealt with by different immigration casework teams.

“All immigration and citizenship cases are reviewed in line with the Immigration Rules.”

Yet lawyers say the shift in the Home Office’s approach is so notable that they are already changing how they operate. Colin Yeo, specialist immigration barrister at Garden Court Chambers, said the department’s responses to media reports mean he is now much less cautious about advising his clients to get publicity. “Previously I’d have advised that press attention was a two-edged sword because stories can develop in unhelpful directions, and anyway, the Home Office and most judges would not be terribly impressed by publicity or public support. They would have thought it was self-serving, essentially. Now I would say that publicity is definitely a worthwhile risk, at least if the person’s situation is one which will be viewed sympathetically in the press and the Home Office might conceivably grant the visa if they think about it rationally.

“It is an awful lot cheaper and quicker than going to court to get a decision reversed. The appeal success rate is now 50%, but waiting times can be as long as 18 months for an appeal and legal costs run to thousands of pounds.”

The “culture of disbelief” at the Home Office is a phenomenon that has been tracked by academics for decades now. Asylum targets were introduced by Tony Blair’s Labour government in the 2000s, and from 1993 to 2006, the UK passed six asylum and immigration acts that promoted policies of greater immigration control. Over two decades, these policies reduced the rate of refugee recognition from 80% to 20% at the initial decision phase.

But Yeo believes that since Theresa May was home secretary, the sceptical culture within the department has grown and been exacerbated by increasingly complicated rules. This has led to poorer decisions and therefore a rise in controversial cases coming to public attention. “You just didn’t have the ‘computer says no’ culture that you have now, where the rules have been really tightened up and really detailed and it’s easy to make mistakes. They’ve removed human discretion from the rules and replaced it with an attempt to code things, which just doesn’t work and results in very inhuman decisions.”