10 October 2013
Last updated at 11:53 GMT

The mammoth and complicated Immigration Bill has been published – and there is lot to be said about it.

But one of the things that needs initially explaining is Home Secretary Theresa May’s statement that the number of decisions that can be appealed with be reduced from 17 to four.

And what’s not clear is whether this proposal will genuinely reduce costs – or that ministers simply hope it will.

So what does the number 17 actually refer to? The Home Office’s target is a list of decisions which can lead to an appeal before the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal.

The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 sets out 14 different immigration decisions that can be appealed against, including:

• A refusal to allow someone to enter the UK
• A refusal to alter someone’s right to be in the UK, meaning they must leave
• Decisions to deport or remove someone from the UK

There are then three other types of decisions that can be appealed against:

• Decisions in asylum cases
• Decisions to revoke refugee status
• Decisions which breach EU law (ie freedom of movement)

The government wants to replace that list of 17 decisions with four appeal categories:

• Cases which involve a human rights claim
• Cases where someone says they need humanitarian or asylum protection
• Cases where such protection has been revoked
• And finally, cases where someone has a right to stay under EU law

The government says that in the case of a foreign criminal, their appeal on human rights grounds would only be heard after they had been removed from the UK – unless there was a risk of serious and irreversible harm.

Now, the four categories do not include cases in which the applicant argues that the decision against them was just plain wrong.

Decisions can be wrong if an official hasn’t properly looked at the facts or has failed to follow their own rules.

Applicants making that argument could try to judicially review a minister – the process which sees a judge look at how a decision was taken and whether it was fair and within the rules.

Ministers of all hues don’t like judicial reviews because they are a direct attack on their decisions and they are legally expensive. So the new system will try to minimise them by sending disputed non-appealable cases into an internal “administrative review”.

That review will aim to clear up errors quickly and cheaply and avoid court battles. Ministers predict that the overall package will lead to 40,000 fewer appeals a year – saving £219m over a decade.

But here’s the interesting detail. All new bills come with a document called the Impact Assessment – a kind of official version of the sums scribbled in the margins. And the Impact Assessment for the Immigration Bill says “there may be an increase in judicial reviews”.

And it goes on: “The Home Office could see an increase in air fare costs from situations where it has to remove failed applicants from the country and also where it subsequently has to fly back any migrants who are successful in their appeal.”

Ministers believe that even if Judicial Reviews increased and it ended up forking out to fly people back to the UK, the costs would be massively offset by the savings of slashing appeals.

But the Home Office doesn’t really know what those costs would be. So the precise savings the legislation will bring are somewhat hypothetical.

Critics say that the real problem is not the appeals – but that too many cases are poorly assessed in the first place.

And until the initial decision-making improves, there will still be cases that end up in the courts.