The 2014 Immigration Act removed the right of appeal to the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal
for various types of immigration decision, and replaced it with an administrative review (AR)
process internal to the Home Office to provide ‘a proportionate and less costly mechanism for
resolving case working errors’.

During the passage of the 2014 Immigration Bill, some MPs and peers argued that an internal
Home Office AR system would not be an effective replacement for an appeal to an Immigration and
Asylum Tribunal judge, who was independent of the Home Office. An amendment was made to the
Bill during its passage through the Lords, resulting in section 16 of the 2014 Act, which stated:
‘Before the end of the period of 12 months beginning on the day on which section 15 comes
into force, the Secretary of State must commission from the Chief Inspector [of Borders and
Immigration] a report that addresses the following matters

• the effectiveness of administrative review in identifying case working errors
• the effectiveness of administrative review in correcting case working errors
• the independence of persons conducting administrative review (in terms of their separation
from the original decision-maker).’

In June 2015, the Home Secretary commissioned a report addressing these three matters.
However, I extended the scope of the inspection to take in service standards in dealing with ARs,
consistency across different areas of the Home Office, and organisational learning and cost savings.
The inspection found that levels of accuracy and consistency varied between in-country,
overseas and ‘at the border’ ARs, but overall there was significant room for improvement in
respect of the effectiveness of ARs in identifying and correcting case working errors, and in
communicating decisions to applicants.

The Home Office had created a separate, dedicated team to handle in-country reviews. But,
most overseas and ‘at the border’ reviews were carried out locally, and while the inspection
found no indications of bias, it was harder to evidence that overseas and ‘at the border’
reviewers were truly separate and independent.

The Home Office was comfortably meeting its 28-day service standard for responses to
administrative review applications, except in a proportion of overseas applications. However,
there was no systematic feedback to reviewers (or to original decision makers) regarding
decisions that had been subject to a successful legal challenge, so organisational learning was at
best patchy. Meanwhile, despite arguing that the introduction of administrative reviews would
save £261m over 10 years, the Home Office had yet to do any analysis of the cost savings.
The report was sent to the Home Secretary on 4 April 2016 and was laid in Parliament on 26
May 2016. It made 14 recommendations, grouped under four headings: administrative review
applications; consideration of reviews; quality assurance; and learning. The Home Office
accepted 13 of the recommendations and partially accepted the fourteenth.