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Fact sheet: Immigration and asylum tribunals

Updated 1 March 2024

Applies to England and Wales

The immigration and asylum tribunal is delivering an efficient and transparent service that’s simple, fair and accessible for all users. The project allows cases to be resolved at an early stage and where appropriate, without the need for a hearing. This saves judicial time and resources.

1. Headline figures

The immigration and asylum tribunal project has achieved several main outcomes so far, including:

• a paper-based process become simpler and more streamlined through a new digital service;
• integration with the Home Office case management system to introduce faster validity checks;
• around 90,000 online appeals received since our first early adopter (private beta) service was launched in January 2019 (almost 90% of receipts);
• digital uptake rates in excess of the targets (90% for legal representatives) and 80% for Appellants in Person (AiP))
• around a quarter of cases settling at an earlier point in the appeal journey without the need for a hearing.

2. Main outcomes

The focus of the Immigration and Asylum project has been to deliver a reformed, end to end, fully digital service within the First-tier Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber. 

• In January 2019 we launched a small pilot in 2 of our hearing centres where selected legal representatives were invited to submit certain asylum appeals through a new digital service.
• We rolled out the service to remaining First-tier hearing centres before opening the digital service to all legal representatives in January 2020.

Once the service was established at a national level for asylum appeals, we broadened it to accept all in-country appeal types from May 2020.

• In March 2021 we delivered a change which allowed legally represented appellants who were outside of the UK to submit appeals online.
• The appellant in person journey went live in August 2021 for in-country asylum appeals.
• All other in-country appeal types were added in December 2021 followed by out of country appeals in May 2022.

Following the successful delivery of a reformed appeal service we turned our attention to bail applications, and, in August 2022 we began piloting digital bail applications at our Hatton Cross hearing centre. This too was a success so during 2023 we expanded the bail pilot to all hearing centres and are now turning our attention to full rollout of the digital bail service.

3. How the immigration and asylum tribunal project helps legal professionals and appellants in person make asylum appeals

Before we introduced the digital service, making an appeal was felt by users to be complex and time consuming. The new service has helped us simplify the process, which has made it easier for the appellant or legal representative to issue an appeal.

• We have reduced data fields from 128 to 36 for legal representatives and 10 for an Appellant in Person for appeal submission.

The digital service also brings improved access and visibility, allowing users to access updates to their case in real time and easily track appeal progression through a visual progress bar. Documents can be served electronically and there is a shared digital bundle for the hearing. The process is overseen by trained legal officers, who will manage the appeal ready for final hearing.

For our legal professionals our digital service is mandated via a Presidential Practice Statement and so they must submit their appeal digitally unless it’s not practicable to do so. For our Appellants in Person (AiP) we understand that not everyone can use the digital service and so they have the option to continue with a paper-based appeal.

4. Looking ahead in 2024

By the end of 2024, we plan to:

• rolled out the new digital service for all bail applications;
• made a number of enhancements to the appeals service to remove some functional gaps, including bringing detained appeals within the digital service;
• rolled out a new integrated scheduling and listing product across all hearing centres; and
• delivered changes to the digital service to support the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and Illegal Migration Act 2023.

The data included on this page is drawn from either management information or MOJ official statistics. Management information reflects the data held on our case management system, and is subject to change. Official statistics are fully quality-assured and form the agreed definitive position.