The Home Office has today published details of its Immigration Bill. It is a wide-ranging proposal firmly in the vein of the recent trend towards toughening up immigration control. For the sake of brevity, below I will cherry-pick the most relevant bits of the Home Office's announcement.
Cutting the right of appeal
The Bill will cut the right of appeal against immigration decisions so that such a right is only held in response to four types of decision (down from seventeen). This has been on the cards for some time and is primarily motivated by a desire to strip out costs from the appeals procedure. Essentially, applicants will only now have a right of appeal when refused asylum, leave on the basis of human rights or where humantarian protection or refugee status is revoked. Appeals against all other types of decision will be replaced by the system of administrative review, which has been prevalent wih entry clearance applications. The Bill does not address quite how an already under-resourced Home Office is to entertain thousands of requests for administrative review. It also deprives potentially millions of applicants from the safety net of an appeal before a specialist independent Tribunal.
The Home Office impact assessment states that many applicants will 'benefit' from a different decisionmaker reviewing a particular decision made, especially, it says, in Points Based System cases which are, it suggests, box-ticking exercises. But how does that approach fit in with the introduction of a 'genuineness' test for many PBS categories, in which decisionmakers are involved in a subjective assessment of the genuineness of an application? Can a review by a colleague of the original decisionmaker ever be objective?
Applicants will be well advised to ensure that when they apply for leave to enter or remain they leave absolutely no room for error whatsoever.
Extending the ability to deport foreign nationals
In what must be seen as a follow on from Theresa May's battle with the courts earlier in the year, the Bill proposes to extend the range of 'non-suspensive appeals'. That is, the Home Office can deport first and an appeal hearing will follow on later (unless there is a prospect of 'irreversible harm'). To me this also appears a worrying development. The consequence of mistakes being made in such a context are extreme.
It is also being proposed at a time when the Government is also seeking to restrict how the courts interpret human rights claims. Indeed the Bill also states that the courts should 'have regard to Parliament's view of what the public interest requires when considering Article 8' (that is, the right to family/private life). Arguably, this is already the case. However, in recent caselaw the courts have already highlighted the difficulties inherent in simply ignoring their duty to uphold international conventions in deference to the perceived public interest. Unless and until the UK takes a leap and ceases to be a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, it cannot simply instruct its courts to ignore it.
Paying for healthcare
Making non-EEA migrant nationals pay for healthcare was the subject of a consultation earlier this year. The proposals are wide-ranging and I will summarise them in a subsequent post. Nevertheless, it is something which prospective migrants to the UK and prospective employers of those migrants will need to bear in mind.
Further checks
The Bill proposes immigration status checks by landlords, banks and the DVLA.
In summary the Bill contains no surprises. Neither does it pull any punches. It is, I believe, the most wide-ranging and fundamental overhaul of the system of rights accorded to foreign nationals in the UK in decades.
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