Judicial Review UK: Landmark Immigration and Asylum Cases of 2025 and 2026
UK immigration and asylum case law in 2025 and 2026 has tested the limits of Home Office powers across citizenship deprivation, sponsor licensing, asylum support and accommodation, right-to-work enforcement, age assessments and removal policy. This article reviews the leading decisions, explains their practical significance and identifies a clear judicial approach: a close scrutiny of fairness, transparency and proper inquiry, paired with restraint on national security assessments and policy choices.
Deprivation of citizenship and national security appeals
In N3 and ZA v SSHD [2025] UKSC 6, the Supreme Court answered two questions about the deprivation of British citizenship. The first was whether the power to deprive depends on the objective fact that the person will not be left stateless. It does not: section 40(4) of the British Nationality Act 1981 deliberately turns on the Secretary of State’s view, formed in good faith and in accordance with public law principles. The second was what follows when an appeal later succeeds on statelessness grounds. Rejecting both the argument that the order is void from the outset and the argument that success operates only for the future, the Court held that for the purpose of determining status the order is treated as having had no effect, so the individual is regarded as having been British throughout. Enforcement action taken in the meantime remains lawful.
Parliament responded quickly. The Deprivation of Citizenship Orders (Effect during Appeal) Act 2025, which received Royal Assent on 27 October 2025, provides that a deprivation order remains in effect until any further appeal by the Secretary of State has been determined. Advisers must therefore explain at the outset that success at first instance will not, of itself, restore citizenship or permit re-entry. N3 remains authority on the effect of a final determination; what has changed is the timing.
U3 v SSHD [2025] UKSC 19 concerned the role of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) in national security appeals. Lord Reed, for a unanimous court, confirmed that SIAC hears a genuine appeal and may consider evidence that was not before the Secretary of State. But where the decision rests on an assessment of national security risk, SIAC does not decide for itself, on the balance of probabilities, whether the underlying facts are proved. Risk is a matter of evaluative and predictive judgment and may rest on a real possibility rather than proof. Given the Secretary of State’s access to expert intelligence advice and her accountability to Parliament, SIAC should attach very considerable weight to her evaluation and ask whether the evidence as a whole provides a rational basis for it. National security appeals are therefore won on public law grounds, such as an assessment the evidence cannot reasonably support or a failure to engage with new material.
In SSHD v Kolicaj [2025] UKSC 49, the Court turned to procedural fairness in deprivation decisions. Mr Kolicaj, a naturalised citizen convicted of conspiring to remove criminal proceeds, was deprived on conducive grounds under section 40(2). The Court of Appeal had quashed the decision, reasoning that a First-tier Tribunal appeal was confined to public law review of the decision as made, leaving a ‘fairness gap’ that only prior representations could fill. Lord Sales rejected that premise. The appeal under section 40A is ‘always on the merits’, the appellant may adduce new evidence, and the Secretary of State must defend her decision in the light of it. There was no gap, and no duty to seek representations before deciding. Taken with U3, the judgment largely closes procedural challenges to the making of deprivation decisions and moves the contest to the appeal, where post-decision evidence is admissible and may be decisive.
Sponsor licence revocation and judicial review
In R (Prestwick Care Ltd) v SSHD [2025] EWCA Civ 184, the Court of Appeal held that, once a mandatory ground for sponsor licence revocation is made out, the Secretary of State need not assess the impact of revocation on the sponsor’s business, its sponsored workers, its service users or the wider care sector. Sponsorship is a privilege founded on a high level of trust; the relevant question is the effect of the breach on immigration control, not the consequences of losing the licence; and the Secretary of State is ‘simply not equipped, in skills or resources’ to assess the knock-on effects for other public bodies. A residual discretion remains, but no obligation. The Court also applied the Balajigari principles to sponsor licensing: a discrepancy may justify suspicion of dishonesty, but the Secretary of State must put that suspicion clearly to the sponsor and consider its response before drawing an inference of deliberate exaggeration.
R (Blue Inn Ltd) v SSHD [2026] EWHC 1649 (Admin) shows those principles in operation. The Home Office revoked the sponsor licence of a construction staffing business on the basis that it was operating as a labour agency and that a sponsored role was not genuine. Tom Little KC, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge, held that although the decision letter did not use the word, the Secretary of State was in substance alleging dishonesty and was therefore obliged to put that allegation to the sponsor. She had not done so. She had also failed to make obvious further inquiries before revoking. Relief was not withheld under section 31(2A) of the Senior Courts Act 1981, since the court could not say the outcome would highly likely have been the same.
The Court of Appeal returned to the subject in R (J’s Supermarket Ltd) v SSHD; R (Prestige Social Care Services Ltd) v SSHD [2026] EWCA Civ 1147. Dingemans LJ restated the Balajigari requirement, but both appeals were dismissed. In J’s Supermarket, the discrepancies had been put to the sponsor at each stage, so the process was fair. In Prestige, the Secretary of State had abandoned one ground in her ‘minded to’ letter and then revived it without warning in the decision, which was unfair. Relief was still refused under section 31(2A), because the decision identified independent grounds on which revocation was highly likely to follow regardless.
Prestwick removes impact-based arguments, while Blue Inn and J’s Supermarket confirm that procedural fairness, particularly where dishonesty is alleged expressly or in substance, is now the principal ground for challenging a sponsor licence revocation by judicial review. Claimants must, however, examine the whole decision letter: where the Secretary of State has relied on a separate, fairly-put ground capable of supporting revocation on its own, section 31(2A) is likely to defeat the claim.
Right to work civil penalties for illegal working
Akbars Restaurant (Middlesbrough) Ltd v SSHD [2026] UKSC 26 was a statutory appeal rather than a judicial review, but it matters to every employer carrying out right to work checks. The restaurant received a £15,000 civil penalty notice reciting all three limbs of section 15(1) of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 without stating which applied. Reversing the courts below, the Supreme Court held that the regime is penal, the limbs are mutually exclusive, and an employer cannot meaningfully object under section 16 or appeal under section 17 without knowing the case it has to meet. Section 15(6)(a) therefore requires the notice to identify the limb relied on, as a condition of validity. The Court declined to apply the Soneji approach to substantial compliance, noting that the Secretary of State can simply issue a fresh notice. The first task on receipt of a civil penalty notice is now to scrutinise the notice itself.
Asylum hotels and asylum accommodation
In Somani Hotels Ltd v Epping Forest DC [2025] EWCA Civ 1134, the Court of Appeal set aside an interim injunction, granted under section 187B of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, that would have stopped the Bell Hotel in Epping operating as an asylum hotel pending trial. He had given weight to protests outside the hotel and failed to consider the national accommodation system, in which closing one site simply requires capacity to be found elsewhere. On protests, the Court warned that treating them as strengthening the case for an injunction ‘runs the risk of acting as an impetus or incentive for further protests. Councils may still pursue planning enforcement against asylum hotels, but interim relief must now account for the Home Secretary’s statutory duty and the system-wide consequences of closure. Public disorder is not a proxy for planning harm.
R (SH) and R (BWO) v SSHD [2026] EWHC 729 (Admin) concerned asylum-seeking families housed for long periods in single hotel rooms. Alan Bates, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge, applied N v Lewisham by analogy to hold that section 95 hotel accommodation, being inherently temporary and subject to its own statutory standard of adequacy, is not a ‘dwelling’ for the overcrowding provisions in Part X of the Housing Act 1985. The claimants nonetheless succeeded on adequacy under sections 95 and 96. Accommodation must meet an objective minimum standard of dignified living, may be adequate only for a limited period, and must reflect the individual’s needs, including children’s welfare and medical evidence. For SH, a single room without cooking facilities, shared with a newborn and a young child, ceased to be adequate after around three months, and a later decision was unlawful for failing to engage with psychiatric evidence. The overcrowding route is closed, but adequacy becomes harder to meet with time, and well-evidenced claims based on duration, family composition and medical need remain strong.
R (Freedom from Torture and Helen Bamber Foundation) v SSHD [2026] EWHC 1278 (Admin) concerned Version 11 of the Allocation of Asylum Accommodation policy, which removed the presumption that survivors of torture, trafficking and serious violence, and disabled people, should not be required to share rooms with strangers. Sweeting J held that the Home Office’s past practice of engaging with expert organisations gave rise to a duty to consult before changes materially affecting their clients, and that the failure to consult was in any event conspicuously unfair. The claimants also succeeded on the public sector equality duty and the Tameside duty of inquiry; the Home Office having failed to consider equality impacts properly or to investigate the likely consequences of the changes. The key changes were quashed, and the Home Office reinstated the protections in an updated policy published on 29 July 2026. It offers a model for challenging policy changes affecting vulnerable groups, in which the consultation, equality and inquiry grounds reinforce one another.
Asylum support appeals and withdrawn asylum claims
SSHD v MAH & Ors [2025] EWCA Civ 1654 addressed a recurring problem in asylum support appeals. Each interested party had their asylum claim treated as implicitly withdrawn under paragraph 333C of the Immigration Rules after missing an interview, and support was then stopped or refused. The Secretary of State argued that the First-tier Tribunal (Asylum Support) could not look behind the withdrawal, leaving judicial review as the only remedy. Stuart-Smith LJ rejected that distinction as ‘wholly artificial and unreal’: the reasoning behind a support decision is part of that decision, and a support decision built on an unlawful withdrawal is inevitably tainted by the error. The Supreme Court refused permission to appeal on 1 May 2026. Claimants can now challenge the withdrawal itself in a free, specialist tribunal, with service of interview invitations and the section 55 duty to children the obvious places to look.
Afghan relocation schemes and ARAP
Two decisions arising from the Afghan relocation schemes mark the limits of judicial intervention. In R (TPL1) v Secretary of State for Defence [2025] EWHC 1729 (Admin), the Divisional Court considered the review of applications under the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) from members of the ‘Triples’, Afghan special forces units that served alongside UK forces. Applying Lumba, it held that the Secretary of State must publish an accurate statement of the scope of the review, because the information already published was inconsistent and liable to mislead. National security justified withholding the caseworker guidance in full, but not withholding a summary of its material parts.
By contrast, in R (RA and AA) v SSFCDA [2026] EWCA Civ 3, which arose from the Afghan data breach and the associated super-injunction, the Court of Appeal set aside orders made by Swift J requiring senior civil servant evidence in other ARAP-related cases and a revision to the Afghanistan Response Route policy statement. Peter Jackson LJ accepted that the situation was ‘wholly abnormal’, but held that a judge has no power to make orders with direct effect in other proceedings, and that a mandatory order requiring ministers to change policy crossed a constitutional boundary: ‘judges do not make policy’. The two decisions are consistent: transparency about how a policy is applied is a legitimate demand of the rule of law, but its content is for the executive. Claimants should seek publication, quashing and reconsideration, not orders dictating policy.
Indefinite Leave to Remain granted by mistake
R (YC) v SSHD [2026] EWCA Civ 285 is now the leading authority on indefinite leave to remain granted by mistake. YC was meant to receive limited leave on private life grounds, but the wrong letter template granted him indefinite leave. He had not applied for ILR and did not qualify for it, and a corrected letter followed within weeks. Cobb LJ, with whom Dingemans LJ agreed, held that the Secretary of State has an implied, incidental power under the Immigration Act 1971 to correct an obvious administrative error of this kind, and that a correction is not a revocation engaging section 76 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. The power is narrow: the mistake must be one the recipient should reasonably have recognised, the correction must be prompt, and the power remains subject to public law constraints, including fairness and Convention rights. Elisabeth Laing LJ dissented, holding that section 76 is a complete code for revoking ILR and that the grant stood until quashed by a court. A client granted a status they did not seek cannot safely rely on it; challenges will turn on delay, the obviousness of the error and any reliance in the interval, and the dissent makes further appeal a real possibility.
Age assessments and ‘one in, one out’ removals to France
The first significant judicial guidance on removals under the UK–France Treaty, the ‘one in, one out’ scheme, came in R (EXR) v SSHD [2026] EWHC 1568 (Admin). The claimant, an age-disputed Eritrean who said he was 17, had been treated as an adult for inadmissibility and treaty removal. Fordham J decided, as a preliminary issue, that such a decision is reviewed for reasonableness rather than correctness. He distinguished R (A) v Croydon, where ‘child’ was a statutory condition in the Children Act 1989: here, the restriction on removing children derives from policy, and policy guidance cannot of itself create a question the court must decide for itself.
His second judgment, R (EXR) v SSHD (No.2) [2026] EWHC 1726 (Admin), gave content to that standard. Scrutiny is close, and the public interest in the treaty’s operation does not reduce it; fresh evidence may be relied on; the Home Office’s latitude on whether a local authority assessment is Merton-compliant is narrow; and finely balanced cases should receive the benefit of the doubt. Where the adult finding is material to a negative trafficking decision, the court reviews it for correctness. Effective challenges remain possible, but they need a strong evidential record and, where trafficking indicators exist, use of the route in which correctness applies.
Clearly unfounded certification of trafficking claims
R (MB) v SSHD [2026] EWCA Civ 1132 concerned certification of an Albanian trafficking survivor’s asylum and human rights claim as clearly unfounded under section 94 of the 2002 Act. MB, who had been trafficked to work on a cannabis farm, was convicted of drug production and deported despite being recognised as a victim of trafficking. The Upper Tribunal quashed the certification and ordered his return; the Court of Appeal allowed the Secretary of State’s appeal. Whipple LJ held that the decision letter had addressed the risk of re-trafficking and applied the correct ‘bound to fail’ test, and that the claim was bound to fail: MB had education, work experience and family in Tirana, almost three years had passed without contact from his traffickers, and nothing beyond his own fear suggested they would seek him out. That they probably belonged to a wider criminal network did not, without more, show that protection would be insufficient in his case. A history of trafficking is relevant but not sufficient; challenges to certification need specific evidence of a continuing threat, of why protection would fail for this individual and of why internal relocation is unavailable.
Immigration case law to watch in 2027
Three themes emerge for anyone bringing an immigration judicial review. Claims built on process (consultation, inquiry, reasons and the duty to put allegations) succeed where challenges to security assessments and policy content fail. Section 31(2A) is being applied with real effect, so a procedural error must be shown to matter to the outcome. A favourable judgment may be short-lived: it took Parliament eight months to limit the practical effect of N3.
The case to watch is Vargova and Molnar, listed in the Supreme Court for 18 and 19 January 2027, on whether EU proportionality principles govern the deportation of EU Settlement Scheme holders for offending after the Brexit transition period. The Court of Appeal held in January 2026 that they do not.
Meet the experts at HJT’s Judicial Review Conference 2026
If the cases above raise questions for your own practice, join us at HJT Training’s acclaimed Judicial Review Conference 2026 on Friday 27 November.
Mark Symes, David Jones, Adrian Berry KC, Duran Seddon KC and Grace Brown of Garden Court Chambers, with Ranjiv Khubber of No5 Chambers, will review immigration public law in 2026 with significant changes in the regime and the impact of importance case precedents on the future judicial review claims. The conference is also an excellent opportunity to network with leading immigration counsel and with peers from across the sector.
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Written by Shareen Khan, Legal Content Writer, HJT Training
Disclaimer: This blog post is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Immigration advisors should consult the full decisions and official policy documents when advising clients on specific cases.