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on May 24, 2024
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No one ever wishes for their immigration or visa application for the UK to be turned down, and yet, this routinely happens to many foreign nationals.
If you have had an immigration application refused or your status revoked by the Home Office, you might have heard of the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber), and you may be interested in knowing whether appealing to this court would be right for you.
If appealing a decision to the First-tier Tribunal would be a feasible route for you, what steps will you need to take? In this article, our award-winning experts in UK immigration law here at Cranbrook Legal set out the essentials.
In the UK justice system, the First-tier Tribunal deals with a wide range of areas of UK law across its seven Chambers. Most of these chambers do not handle immigration matters; they hear appeals in relation to such areas of law as social security, children’s education, tax, and disputes over property and land.
One of those Chambers, however, is the Immigration and Asylum Chamber. This Chamber handles appeals with regard to certain decisions by the Home Office to do with foreign nationals’ permission to stay, deportation from and entry clearance to the UK.
For most people who seek to appeal a refusal by the Home Office, the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) will be the first court to which they have access. It is an independent court, separate from the Home Office.
If, then, you submit an appeal application to this court, there will eventually be a hearing. A judge will listen to your argument and that of the Home Office, before making a decision. This decision will be to allow your appeal, or to dismiss your appeal – and if the latter happens, the Home Office’s original decision will be upheld.
It is important to realise that even if your appeal is allowed, this does not automatically mean you will be able to enter or stay in the UK. It might simply mean that the Home Office is required to reconsider its decision.
You will be able to appeal to the Immigration and Asylum Chamber if the Home Office has decided to:
In explaining here how to appeal a decision to the Immigration and Asylum Chamber, we will presume you made your application on or after 6th April 2015. If your application was made prior to this date, a different procedure applies.
The exact process (for those whose immigration application was on or after the aforementioned date) will depend on whether the appellant is applying for themselves, or whether a legal professional will be applying on the appellant’s behalf.
You can have a solicitor or adviser on immigration law lodge the appeal for you – in which case, presuming you are not in detention, they will need to do so online, using the MyHMCTS service.
If you apply after the deadline, you will need to explain why; the tribunal will then decide whether it can still hear your appeal.
You will be allowed to appeal later if your administrative review was unsuccessful for an EU Settlement Scheme, frontier worker, or S2 healthcare visitor application. When you receive the decision on your administrative review, the process for how to appeal will be explained to you.
Both the UK Government and our experts in UK immigration law here at Cranbrook Legal advise that you apply online if possible. This is because an online appeal will be a quicker process than a post or fax appeal.
According to UK Government tribunal statistics for the final three months of 2023 (October to December) – the most recently available at the time of typing – in the First-tier Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber, the mean time taken to clear appeals was 43 weeks. This was two weeks more than the waiting time recorded a year earlier.
The mean time to clear appeals varied slightly over different categories:
Sadly, amid the continuing asylum appeal backlog, it has been reported that many people have been forced to wait many months, as even as long as a year, for their appeal hearing. These officially released statistics are in line with such reported timeframes. It is also important to note that the judge does not usually decide whether to allow or dismiss an appeal at the hearing itself. The UK Government states that appellants will “usually” receive a copy of the tribunal’s decision within four weeks of the hearing; in practice, you may need to wait several months.
Following the submission of your appeal, you can expect the First-tier Tribunal to send you Directions setting out what steps you will need to take next.
The first of those steps will be to provide the Tribunal, as well as the Home Office in its capacity as the respondent, with your email address and phone number within five working days. The Home Office will then have a 14-day window in which to provide a bundle consisting of its refusal letter and any evidence that you submitted to support your claim. Included among this evidence should be transcripts of your Home Office interviews.
After the Home Office provides its bundle, you will be expected to provide an Appellant’s Explanation of Case (AEC). This will enable you to set out in detail why you believe the Home Office’s refusal letter to be wrong.
You can handwrite or type up the AEC; you should attempt to respond to every paragraph in the Home Office’s refusal letter that you disagree with. If, in your AEC, you refer to any evidence that the Home Office’s bundle doesn’t contain, you should include it in your own bundle.
Within 14 days of you providing the AEC, the respondent – the Home Office – will need to carry out a meaningful review of your case, with both the AEC and your bundle taken into account, before setting out the outcome of this review and stating any further refusal grounds to you in writing. This process will necessitate the Home Office taking a fresh look at your evidence.
It might be that as a consequence of this review, the Home Office withdraws its refusal of your claim and makes a new decision. Alternatively, the department may decide to simply restate the points it made to you in its refusal letter. In the event of the Home Office maintaining its decision to refuse your claim even after its review, the Tribunal will send you a Notice of Hearing. This will inform you of the hearing time, date, and location. There are a number of hearing centres, and you will probably be assigned the one nearest the address that you stated in your application.
If you believe a legal mistake was made with a decision by the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber), you may have the option of appealing to the Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber). This court, like the First-tier Tribunal, is independent of the Home Office, and will consider both sides’ arguments prior to making a decision.
You will need to seek permission from the First-tier Tribunal to appeal to the Upper Tribunal. The form to ask for permission will be provided to you when you receive your decision, so you will simply need to send it with a copy of the decision to the address on the form.
Please bear in mind that your appeal to the Upper Tribunal will only be successful if you can present a convincing argument that the decision was legally wrong. You may be able to do this if, for instance, the tribunal:
Appealing to the Upper Tribunal is free of charge; however, you will need to meet the relevant timing and documentation requirements. To learn more about this process and about how our specialists in UK immigration law may be able to help, please contact us.
We are skilled and experienced experts in the handling of UK immigration appeals
While it is possible to prepare and lodge an immigration appeal by yourself as an overseas national in or outside of the UK, this can be a risky endeavour, particularly given how rights of appeal in UK immigration cases have become more restricted in recent years.
If, then, you wish to ensure the utmost peace of mind and the strongest possible chance of success on appeal to the First-tier Tribunal or the Upper Tribunal, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the Cranbrook Legal team.
You are welcome to call us on 0208 215 0053, or to complete and submit our online contact form to arrange a free consultation. You might also be interested in our previous guide to what you should and shouldn’t do when putting together an immigration appeal.
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