80% of overseas immigration visa refusals are overturned

[mkhan2525]

Regardless of which side of the immigration debate you sit on, no-one has much faith in the quality of decision-making in the system. New data from a Freedom of Information requests suggests that is a sound judgement to have come to.

According to the government's own figures, a whopping 80% of entry clearance refusals which are subject to a review are subsequently overturned.

Entry clearances are the stamp given out by British missions overseas before a person arrives in the UK saying that they qualify for entry into the country. Since July, appeal rights have been heavily restricted and are generally only open to those claiming Article 8 (the right to family life) and asylum seekers. For the rest, the only recourse is an administrative review undertaken by a peer of the entry clearance officer, who will be either another officer or a manager, or in more extreme cases a judicial review.

The freedom of information request was made by dogged campaigner Sonel Mehta, founding trustee of the group BritCits, which fights for British families torn apart by the government's income benchmark on spousal visas.

The information she received showed there were 5,462,780 applications between July 2012 and June 2014.

Of these, 607,880 were refused. There was obviously a demand for a review in just over half the cases, because 368,000 were then checked again.

Of those, 292,445 applications were issued following the review and 75,560 refusals were maintained. That comes in at just under an 80% success rate.

Anyone with experience of how applications are treated overseas will know the unique combination of incompetence, stony-faced indifference and Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare which accompanies the process. Most of the mistakes I've seen have been baffling and rudimentary, such as a rejection for providing a bank form without the stamp of the bank on the front page, when it is there for all to see.

That sounds minor, but each of these rejections means families kept apart for further months, jobs lost, building legal fees and the oppressive weight of an ongoing immigration problem shadowing your day-to-day life.

Even for those aware of the scale of the issue though, naked figures like these are startling. An 80% appeal success rate should be enough to make any department head think again, but the Home Office has grown indifferent to its own failings. For years now, the immigration system has ceased being a functional arm of government and become a stumbling conveyer-belt of inadequacies. As everyone recognises, including successive home secretaries, it's just not up to the job.

My hunch is this type of failure is allowed – or even encouraged. Remember only half of those refusals were appealed at all. Allowing the wrongful rejection of entry clearances is just another way to hammer down those numbers. There's a strong possibility that a reject-first attitude has taken over the processing of entry clearance applications, in the knowledge most of these will be overturned on appeal.

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2014/11 ... are-overtu

[alil2014]

doesn't surprise me at all. Taxpayers money being wasted!

[sherriesmum]

you cant appeal on family visitor visas u have to reapply or appeal only on grounds of human rights or race discrimination.we should embrace all immigrants who benefit our country and contribute to it in a positive way.

[vinny]

See also Visit visa refusals: appeal or judicial review?

It seems that they are removing rights of appeal because too many of them are successful and to save costs.

Do the figures for ECM reviews include ARs?

[MPH80]

What really stands out for me (beyond what's already been discussed) in these stats is the surprisingly low refusal rate.

Over 5 million applications - just 607,000 refusals. Interesting.

I'd also be very interested to see these stats broken out by visa type - e.g. are some visas more prone to rejection than others.

It'd also be very interesting to see that figure over time - has it got better or worse as the processes have been centralised?

I think the final thing to take into account is that there's an 80% success rate for those visas which are appealed. 50% of them are never appealed - and we can't draw direct conclusions on that. It could be that if they were all appealed - a further 80% would be overturned - but it would seem likely that those that request review are more likely to be successful as the applicant or their representative can see an error. Still 80% seems amazingly high.

[Obie]

Thanks Mkhan2525 for the post . This makes a very interesting reading.

I keep telling people how incompetent these officials are, but they don't believe the true picture of the chronically bad state of the Immigration decision making process.

The government will be more keen on spending 150K to deport a single individual, inorder to show tough, rather than invest in training those UKBA staff.

Some of them can't even construct a line of decent English to save their life. You wonder how they got the position.

I recently received a refusal letter for someone. The grammatical error was such that i had to call the Home Office to check that the letter originated from them.

Pretty Pathetic.