8 April

On 25 March 2020, the Home Office published its response to the Law Commission’s report on Simplifying the Immigration Rules, promising to overhaul the Immigration Rules in order to ‘cut complexity and make the Rules clear, consistent and accessible’.

Overall the recommendations concern stylistic and formatting changes, designed to ensure ease of navigation and improve understanding of the Rules. The Home Office fully accepted 24 of the 41 recommendations posed, and partially accepted the remaining 17 recommendations.

Some key recommendations which were fully accepted by the Home Office include:

• a complete overhaul of the Rules;
• a less prescriptive approach to evidential requirements, ensuring however that acceptable evidence is specified where necessary to ensure certainty;
• the removal of inconsistent and/or unnecessary repetitions;
• the publication of at most two major changes to the Rules per year; and
• the implementation of an improved process for receiving and responding to user feedback.

Other fully accepted recommendations include formatting, structural and numbering recommendations.

The Home Office acknowledged that the remaining 17 recommendations posed covered areas needing improvement, however these recommendations were accepted only in part by the Home Office. The recommendations include those relating to the relationship between the Rules, application forms and guidance and the use of definitions within the Rules. A call for responses and feedback in relation to the areas covered by these recommendations was issued to the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) by the Home Office on 26 March 2020.

As detailed in the response, a ‘Simplification of the Rules Review Committee’ has already been established by the Home Office to consider the structure and drafting of the Rules, ensure that the simplification principles apply in the future and provide ongoing support to the improve and adapt the Rules. If the Committee works effectively and all accepted recommendations are implemented, we should expect to see a single, coherent set of Immigration Rules, resulting in the ‘biggest shake-up of the immigration systems in a generation’. It will be interesting to see whether the Home Office fulfils this goal whilst simultaneously managing the effects of COVID-19, responding to the Windrush lessons learned review by Wendy Williams and implementing the new points-based immigration system.