Month: July 2026

Happy Baby Community is a project started by local Quakers and we discussed this issue at the recent QARN AGM. Another extreme example of what the hostile environment looks like in practice …

2026 July 12: Happy Baby: Healthy Start Briefing

What is the Issue to be raised in parliament?

Healthy Start Vouchers are given to all pregnant mothers and children 4 years and under in England, Wales and Northern Ireland except asylum seekers.

This makes no sense whatsoever in Public Health terms as most of these children will grow into adulthood here and will potentially have poorer health outcomes than the rest of the population.

The government had a chance to change this in the Child Poverty Strategy 5th December 2025, but they failed to include asylum seeking pregnant women and children under 4 years.

Asylum seekers in hotels receive £9.95 per week per person. The hotel food is of poor nutritional value and many of the women we work with have gestational diabetes and their children lack a balanced diet.

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7 July 2026: Migrant Voice: Changes to the immigration and asylum systems risk increasing harm

Proposed changes to the immigration and asylum systems pose significant risk to individuals in them, and the country as a whole. These hostile policies create a system where all migrants face increased discrimination, division and hate. Labour must take the opportunity of a change in leadership to rethink this course of action.

Increasing lengths of some visa routes from five years to ten, at least, and then applying it retroactively for those already in the system is a cruel and inhumane proposal which leaves many migrants in fear for our futures. Unable to build lives, or have stability, these proposals undermine our health and our families.

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Published 25 June 2026: Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration comments on the inspection report on contact management following its publication.

Where a person is in the UK without valid leave to enter or remain, the Home Office needs to make and maintain contact with them in order to progress any outstanding application, to encourage the person to regularise their stay or depart the UK voluntarily, or in some cases to work towards an enforced removal.

This inspection – which was conducted between September 2024 and February 2025 – examined how the Home Office seeks to maintain contact, what it does to re-establish contact if it has been lost, and the impact of lost contact on both the business of the Home Office and on the migrants themselves. As ever, inspectors focused on the efficiency, effectiveness, and consistency of the Home Office’s efforts.

The sheer scale of the task presents the Home Office with a challenge, and this inspection found that cross-system working to address this challenge is inhibited by a plethora of hand-offs, poor communication, and weaknesses in data collection and sharing (compounded by deficient IT). Some steps had been taken towards promoting a better system-wide approach, but the extent and interdependent nature of what needs to be done means there is a risk that the resources required to deliver further improvements will not be found or, if found, will be diverted to other priorities before the necessary changes can be made and embedded.

Continue reading “An inspection of Home Office management of contact with migrants who are without leave to enter or remain”

Published 25 June 2026: Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration comments on the inspection report on administrative reviews following its publication.

When the present system of administrative reviews (AR) was introduced in 2015, replacing a raft of rights to appeal to the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal, the government’s stated intention was to provide “a proportionate and less costly mechanism for resolving caseworking errors.” At that time, the government committed to a service standard of 28 days for the Home Office to complete an AR, which it explained was much faster than the then average of 12 weeks for an appeal to be heard. When this inspection of ARs began in 2025, the system was a long way from operating as intended.

This inspection focused on the resourcing of the two Home Office teams responsible for handling AR applications; workflow and the prioritisation of AR applications; the quality, timeliness, and consistency of AR decision making, including quality assurance; and communication and engagement between Home Office AR teams and applicants and stakeholders.

Continue reading “Inspection report published: An inspection of administrative reviews”

Published 25 June 2026: Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration – the Independent Chief Inspector comments on the asylum casework inspection report following its publication

Asylum casework is an area that the ICIBI has inspected several times in the past, most recently in 2023, shortly after the then Prime Minister’s pledge to clear the legacy asylum decision backlog. That inspection raised concerns that the focus on clearing the backlog ‘at all costs’ had resulted in the prioritisation of quantity over quality, with a potential negative impact on the efficiency of the end-to-end asylum process. This inspection – which examined the factors affecting the quality of asylum decision making – mirrored those findings. It found that while the Home Office had continued to make progress addressing the backlog of asylum cases awaiting a decision, decision quality had declined significantly and was at an unacceptable level, which had consequences for the rest of the system.

Continue reading “The Independent Chief Inspector comments on the asylum casework inspection report following its publication.”

2 July 2026: Freemovement: What’s in the Immigration and Asylum Bill 2026?

The Bill announced in the King’s Speech on 13 May 2026 has now been published and is beginning its slow passage through Parliament. It is the fifth immigration-related Act across five sessions of Parliament, no less. It seeks to fulfil the commitments made in the White Paper a year prior, including draconian new measures to penalise refugees and asylum seekers.

To try and help make sense of it, Free Movement have created an online Bill Tracker app that shows tracked changes on amended versions of other laws that will be affected by the new Bill. The official explanatory notes (the government’s own version of what the clauses of the Bill are supposed to accomplish) are woven through it and it will be kept up to date with amendments and new versions.

So what does it entail? Here are some non-exhaustive highlights: https://freemovement.org.uk/whats-in-the-immigration-and-asylum-bill-2026