Scrutinising the Immigration and Asylum Bill
Our Submission to the Human Rights (Joint Committee)
- Will the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority established by the Bill provide a fair hearing of immigration and asylum cases and comply with the ECHR and Refugee Convention?
- Are clauses 17 to 20 of the Bill, concerning the application of Article 8 of the ECHR by courts and tribunals, consistent with the UK’s obligations under the ECHR?
- Is it compatible with Article 34 of the Refugee Convention to provide refugees with temporary rather than permanent protection? Does this change give rise to any other human rights concerns?
- Does the power to require payments from recipients of asylum support raise any human rights concerns?
- Are the modern slavery provisions in the Bill compatible with the UK’s obligations under Article 4 of the ECHR and the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings?
- Are there any other human rights issues raised by the Bill or the government’s implementation of its November 2025 policy statement “Restoring Order and Control”?
We responded to this inquiry because the proposed changes are comprehensive: altering how appeals are decided, how family life is weighed, how long protection lasts, and what it costs to receive protection from the British state, literally and metaphorically. Given the scale of that shift, and the number of people whose safety and stability depend on getting it right, we think it necessary to set out clearly where we believe the Bill falls short.
A number of points made in this submission also build on points we have raised in earlier consultations, particularly our submission to the OHCHR on Article 8 and family life and our submission to the Home Office opposing reforms to asylum support. The concerns we raise are consistent with, and in places extend, the arguments made in those earlier submissions.
We are unable to share the full submission until the Joint Committee has decided what to do with it; in the meantime, we will share a summary of the key points below. Once a decision has been made we will publish the submission in full for all to read.
Work through the toggle below for a summary of the points made in our submission.
The Bill would replace the immigration tribunal with a new Independent Immigration Appeals Authority, staffed by “adjudicators” who need not be legally qualified. We consider this an unnecessary risk to add to decisions of this consequence, and one that is unlikely to deliver the efficiencies claimed; diluting the quality of decision-making is more likely to increase, not reduce, the volume of judicial review.
The Authority’s independence is also difficult to reconcile with its design: its most senior staff are Home Secretary appointments, and it will sit within a Home Office that has been explicit about its priority of maximising removals. More fundamentally, this reform does not address the source of the backlog it is meant to solve.
The evidence consistently points to poor initial decision-making as the primary defect in the system, not the appeals stage that follows it, and reforming the latter without correcting the former simply relocates the failure rather than resolving it.
We are disappointed but not suprised that this is not the first time a situation like this has occurred.
Over 20 years ago, the Home Affairs Committee came to the following conclusion that reads as if it were written today:
“The real flaws in the system appear to be at the stage of initial decision-making, not that of appeal. The implementation of the new asylum appeals system should be contingent on a significant improvement in initial decision making having been demonstrated. In particular, the relevant sections of the Act should not be brought into force until the statistics show a clear reduction in the number of successful appeals at the first-tier, adjudication level.”
Clauses 17 to 20 narrow the application of Article 8, redefining family life around a “core cohabiting family,” reducing the weight given to time spent in the UK unlawfully, and raising the threshold at which a child’s best interests can outweigh removal.
We reject the premise underlying these changes: that Article 8 constitutes a loophole being exploited at scale. The government’s own evidence indicates that only around one in ten deportation appeals have succeeded on human rights grounds.
Legislating this firmly against such a narrow phenomenon is, in our view, a disproportionate response, and one difficult to square with the case-by-case approach the European Court of Human Rights has consistently required.
This is yet another example of the UK’s political class proposing massive, overblown solutions that will interfere with life outside of the intended context for minuscule problems that are not without alternative resolutions. This logic reflects the increasingly popular but out-of-touch and misinformed narrative regarding the UK’s relationship with the European Court of Human Rights.
We do not consider the shift from permanent to temporary refugee protection compatible with the Refugee Convention’s duty to facilitate settlement. Up to twenty years of leave granted in 30-month blocks, each subject to a fresh “safe returns review,” represents a cruel and needless level of certainty uncertainty without precedent on the European continent. A path that we struggle to see dovetailing with refugee conventions demands for positive steps towards integration.
This is compounded by a proposed retrospective charge of approximately £10,000 for asylum support, repayable before settlement can be granted. Given that refugees already have markedly weaker employment outcomes than other migrants, we consider it improbable that this debt will be recovered at any meaningful scale; the more likely outcome is prolonged indebtedness with little corresponding financial benefit to the state.
If the overt aim is to recover and/or reduce costs associated with the UK’s inefficient asylum system, then permitting earlier access to the labour market would achieve considerably more at a lower human cost.