Changes to the Immigration Rules: From UK Visas and ImmigrationFirst published: 3 November 2016

The Home Office is making changes to the Immigration Rules affecting a number of categories.
The government announced today, 3 November, changes to the Immigration Rules which will affect applications made on or after 24 November unless stated otherwise.

The main changes are outlined below:

Tier 2
Implement the first of 2 phases of changes to Tier 2, announced by the government in March following a review by the Independent Migration Advisory Committee.

Increasing the Tier 2 (General) salary threshold for experienced workers to £25,000, with some exemptions
Increasing the Tier 2 (Intra-Company Transfer) salary threshold for short term staff to £30,000
Reducing the Tier 2 (Intra-Company Transfer) graduate trainee salary threshold to £23,000 and increasing the number of places to 20 per company per year
Closing the Tier 2 (Intra Company Transfer) skills transfer sub-category
These changes will come into effect for all certificates of sponsorship assigned by Tier 2 sponsors on or after 24 November 2016. The date from which intra company transfers will be liable for the health surcharge will be announced in due course.

Tier 4
A number of changes are being made, including amendments to the academic progression rule, maintenance requirements for the Doctorate Extension Scheme and evidence of overseas qualifications, UK qualifications used as evidence, and a series of minor and technical adjustments.

English language requirement

As announced in January this year, a new English language requirement at level A2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is being introduced for non-EEA partners and parents.

This affects those applying to extend their stay after 2.5 years in the UK on a 5-year route to settlement under Appendix FM (Family Member) of the Immigration Rules. The new requirement will apply to partners and parents whose current leave under the family Immigration Rules is due to expire on or after 1 May 2017.

More information is available in the statement of changes.

Immigration appeal delays ‘shocking’ as backlog reaches 63,00

MPs have said the immigration appeals system is on the verge of a crisis as delays continue to plague the process. Hackney South MP Meg Hillier has told the Gazette that the number of people reporting problems with the immigration appeals process has reached record levels.

Her Labour colleague Keith Vaz, MP for Leicester East, last week told parliament that appeals to bring a spouse into the country now take up to 18 months just to get a tribunal hearing date.

The Gazette reported in October that immigration appeal hearings were being put back by up to nine months and that HM Courts and Tribunals Service had drawn up a list of ‘priority’ cases to ensure the most urgent issues were dealt with.

Statistics published by the Ministry of Justice earlier this month reveal the caseload in the First-tier Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber was 62,900 at the end of September – an increase of 20% compared to the same time in 2015.

The tribunal disposed of 18,000 appeals from July to September this year – down 13% on the same period in 2015.

The mean age of a case at disposal in the FTTIAC was 48 weeks in the third quarter of 2016 – 15 weeks longer than last year.

Hillier, who is chair of the commons Public Accounts Committee, said she was sympathetic to the complexities of the immigration appeals system but the current state of the system was ‘shocking’.

‘The response of the government has been pretty poor and it is having a devastating impact on people’s lives,’ she said. ‘People are coming to my surgery who have not heard when their case will be or have been told to wait months.

‘Rather than being in denial the government needs to get a grip and understand there is an issue.’

The government says the increase in average time taken for cases to be cleared is due to an increased proportion of more complex cases which require more court time.

This also impacts the number of disposals and in turn is reflected in the number of cases outstanding.

Justice minister Sir Oliver Heald was quizzed by Vaz directly on the delays during last week’s evidence session of the House of Commons justice committee.

Vaz said he had a ‘very heavy caseload’ on immigration and suggested the government has a problem with delays in the immigration and asylum system.

He stated there are fewer immigration judges and said tribunal users are not getting a good service at present.

Heald replied: ‘I accept that we need to improve that area. We are working very hard on it, and I am hopeful that speeds will improve.’

Pressed to say whether he knew the current levels of immigration backlogs in the courts, he said there had been work done on this, but he did not have a figure to hand.

In response to a written question this month on immigration appeals, Heald added: ’We do everything we can to avoid unnecessary delay in the Immigration & Asylum Tribunal and we have provided an additional 4,950 tribunal sitting days for this financial year to ensure current case loads do not increase.

‘We are keeping performance under close review and are confident there is sufficient capacity to deal with the number of appeals we expect to receive.’

By John Hyde22 December 2016
The Law Society Gazette

Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration examines Home Office’s tackling of sham marriages

16 December 2016, EIN

The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt, yesterday released an inspection report examining how efficiently and effectively the Home Office had implemented the new provisions in the Immigration Act 2014 for tackling sham marriage.

The 44-page report is here, and a 5-page Home Office response to the report is here.

In January 2013, the Home Office estimated that between 3,000 and 10,000 applications to stay in the UK per year were made on the basis of sham marriages. In 2014, the then Immigration Minister, James Brokenshire, said that the new Immigration Act would provide “a much stronger platform for effective, systematic action to disrupt and deter sham marriages and civil partnerships.”

The Chief Inspector found that initial implementation of the new provisions for tackling sham marriage was problematic, stating in his report: “The new approach had not been communicated effectively, and some registrars interpreted the fact that Immigration Enforcement and Compliance (ICE) teams were no longer attending register offices to prevent ceremonies from going ahead as the Home Office being less interested in sham marriage. Staff in the new Marriage Referral Assessment Unit (MRAU) felt deskilled as they struggled with heavily administrative processes, fragmented IT and limited operational support from local ICE teams. Cases were not being determined within 70 days.”

He continued: “Managers intervened to devise a new process (Operation Equal), with ICE teams taking on responsibility for investigations. A pilot, which began in January 2016, produced encouraging results in terms of cases completed to time. However, a high proportion of couples were determined to be genuine, raising questions about profiling (which excluded consideration of nationality despite statistics showing certain nationalities to be prominent in sham marriages), and the ability of interviewers to expose sham couples who had prepared well or been coached by facilitators.”

In terms of numbers, the report found that for the period March to August 2016 inclusive, a total of 23,948 marriage notices were referred to the Home Office’s Marriage Referral Allocation Unit (MRAU). Of those couples, 17,818 were allowed to marry at 28 days, while the remaining 6,130 were extended to 70 days and ICE teams were asked to undertake investigations.

The report provided details from investigations carried out by three pilot ICE teams in Scotland, the West Midlands and West London from January to August 2016.

The majority of investigations by two of those teams, Scotland and the West Midlands, resulted in a determination that the marriage was ‘non sham’ (60.4% and 52.3% respectively), while the West London team determined a majority of its investigations were sham marriages and only 28.8% were found to be non sham.

Teams from Scotland and the West Midlands told the Chief Inspector that they felt many of the couples they interviewed were too well-prepared to be caught out giving answers that did not tally, even when interviewed for four hours.

The Chief Inspector made the following recommendations to the Home Office in the report:

1. Where a marriage is determined to be sham but is allowed to proceed because the couple has been compliant with an investigation, ensure that the couple is informed in writing of the determination to act as a deterrent.

2. Recommunicate the aims of Part 4 of the Immigration Act 2014 to registrars and provide more feedback on the outcomes from referrals.

3. Ensure that staff are provided with:

• interview skills training and development to enable them to deal effectively with well-prepared sham couples; and

• sufficient understanding of the experiences of potentially duped and of vulnerable partners to inform effective questioning.

4. Seek Ministerial agreement to add certain nationalities to the profiling approach.

5. Ensure that data is collected in relation to sham marriage in a form that enables an accurate and comprehensive evaluation of the outcomes from the Immigration Act 2014 changes and provides Ministers and Parliament with a clear picture of the threat and how it is being met.

In its response, the Home Office said it accepted all of the Chief Inspector’s recommendations.