NCADC Campaigning Toolkit
NCADC was founded in 1995, and since then we have witnessed huge changes to the asylum and immigration systems, changes that have had dramatic consequences for people seeking leave to remain in the UK.
Prior to 2007, when a new system for processing asylum claims was brought in, you might wait weeks or months from first applying for asylum until you had your first asylum interview. You then might wait many more weeks and months before receiving a decision. If your claim was refused, it could then be years before any attempt was made to remove you from the UK and this time was often spent in the community (not in immigration detention). At the end of this prolonged process, you might have developed very strong links to your local community, and have long-term relationships in the UK and children born and raised here.
Now, you could be interviewed just days or weeks after claiming asylum. You could potentially receive your decision (usually a refusal) within another couple of weeks, and be ‘appeal rights exhausted’ (very limited or no legal routes left) just six months from entering the UK. With decisions being made more quickly, and with the dramatic increase in the use of immigration detention, forming strong campaigning communities to support you when things go wrong has become more challenging.
In the non-asylum immigration system, it has become far more difficult to have your right to remain recognised based on your length of time in the UK, your family or your community connections in the UK.
As well as broadening ideas of what campaigning can mean, and being creative about campaigning tactics, NCADC and local campaign groups are all too often approached by people at risk of deportation or their supporters when there are only 48 hours or less until the scheduled deportation. It is understandable that you may not want to think about your application being refused and you being deported from the UK until you have to. But the more prepared you are for a campaign, the more chance there is that a campaign will succeed. Home Office figures show that around 75-80% of asylum applications are refused at first-instance. NCADC aims – with its members, supporters and partners – both to reduce this number and to better prepare people for a negative decision.
This is becoming even more crucial as legal support declines. Changes in the way legal aid is financed, and cuts to legal aid, had already made it harder to secure good quality legal representation. Drastic changes to legal aid in April 2013 - and proposed further changes which will particularly affect people in detention and those seeking judicial review - mean that access to justice is seriously under threat. Read more here.
Migrants who are applying for leave to enter or remain in the UK and do not have the funds to pay a private solicitor will be fending for themselves in a highly complicated immigration system.
