By Nikolaos Margaritis
The United Kingdom operates a mechanism within its asylum system intended to give those seeking asylum but who have exhausted their right to appeal another opportunity for protection. This is called the ‘further submissions’ process or colloquially a ‘fresh claim’. Ordinarily, the further submissions process is intended to ensure that there is a mechanism to examine new evidence or other new issues giving rise to a new claim for international protection. However, are there other issues within the UK’s asylum system that make further submissions necessary to ensure just outcomes?
This short paper contends that ‘yes, there are’ and argues that these are located in, firstly, problems with legal representation in the asylum process and, secondly, poor decision making within the Home Office’s decision making. The key findings are as follows:
- Only a small and shrinking number of solicitors undertake asylum work, and many lack capacity or are forced to withdraw from the market due to the low rate of legal aid cases. As a result, applicants are often unrepresented at the initial stage, leading to refusals and difficulties on appeal. The further submissions process is therefore a vital safeguard for those unable to obtain representation at the outset.
- Even where applicants secure legal advice, it is frequently inadequate due to incompetence and inexperience, or overworked and underpaid advisers. This results in poorly argued claims, refusals, and appeal difficulties, making the further submissions process an important second opportunity to secure an equitable outcome.
- Home Office decision making has sharply deteriorated, with accuracy falling to 52% in 2023-2024 (down 20% from the previous year) due to practices introduced to clear the initial decision backlog. As a result, nearly half of initial decisions are now overturned on appeal, increasing the importance of ‘fresh’ asylum claims for those with legitimate protection needs.
- Finally, there are chronic problems in Home Office decision-making. Decision-makers have repeatedly been found to make flawed credibility assessments -the central element of proving an asylum claim- due to decision-maker bias and the application of a higher standard of proof than the law requires. This imposes an unreasonable evidential burden that applicants are often unable to meet due to their circumstances. As a result, a ‘culture of disbelief’ has calcified in the Home Office, with asylum seekers approached with suspicion from the outset, leaving the further submissions process, in some cases, as the only effective means of overcoming individual and institutional bias and securing recognition for valid claims.
Problems with legal representation within the asylum process
Problems with legal representation manifest as a result of (a) gaps in legal representation within the asylum process and (b) poor legal representation, the former being the most significant of the two. In respect of the first factor, legal representation by an immigration solicitor is often unavailable to many asylum seekers making their first claim, often leading to improperly argued cases the first time around as asylum seekers have to navigate this complex legal process by themselves (United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNHCR), 2025, p36). As a result of these improperly argued cases, asylum seekers often have their claims rejected by Home Office decision-makers, and face carry-over problems on appeal to the First-tier Immigration Tribunal (UNHCR 2025, p36). There are various contributing factors to asylum seekers’ access to advice.
The first is the growing backlogs of cases both for initial decisions (UNHCR, 2025, p36) which stood at around 62,000, and for appeals to the First-tier tribunal, which stood alarmingly close to 70,000, at the end of September 2025 (Wright, 2025). The large backlog means that the few immigration solicitors which are willing to take on asylum cases do not have capacity for new clients (UNHCR, 2025, p36).
The second, and arguably more significant factor for the lack of legal representation, is the lack of legal aid. Legal aid is structured in a way that means the compensation solicitors receive is not enough to cover the work necessary for a claim, often leading to significant amounts of unpaid work, a turn to alternative sources of funding such as grants from local authorities which have in recent days been limited due to budgeting pressures (Wilding, 2025, p12), or more commonly the withdrawal of legal aid providers from the market, thus worsening an already bad situation (UNHCR, 2025, p36). As a result, there is simply not enough supply to satisfy demand: at least 57 per cent of people seeking asylum were unable to find a legal aid lawyer in 2024-2025, up from 17 per cent in 2021-2022 (Wilding, 2025, p12).
Despite the recent increase of legal aid rates by the Labour government that took effect on 22December 2025, this would only bring the sector to around £65/hr outside of London and £69/hr in London (Yeo, 2025). Whilst some may chafe at an hourly rate of £65/hr or £69/hr, especially when funded by the taxpayer, the reader would do well to remember that the government guidelines for the assessment of court costs suggest a rate of £142/hr even for trainee solicitors outside major urban centres (HM Courts & Tribunals Service, 2026). While the latter is used for calculating court costs after litigation, a very different context and type of work than legal aid asylum cases, it provides a good, objective reference point to understand how low-paying legal aid work truly is. As a result, we may concur with Mr Yeo’s doubts as to whether this increase will be enough to build the capacity the capacity necessary to meet the unmet need (Yeo, 2025), or whether it will be enough to stem the existential crisis in staff recruitment and retention that legal aid providers face in this area, particularly at the supervisor level (Wilding, 2025).
Furthermore, there are legal aid deserts in much of England and Wales (Scotland and N. Ireland have separate legal systems and separate rules on legal aid), meaning that asylum seekers located outside of London and larger metropolitan hubs cannot obtain advice unless they can overcome the physical and financial constraints of travel (UNHCR, 2025, p36). In fact, the entirety of England and Wales has a legal aid adviser deficit, including London (Wilding 2025, p12). Even in London, which theoretically holds more high-level advisers than the entirety of the UK combined, capacity has not grown from 2022 when it was a maximum of 4-4,500 pieces of casework a year, when demand today has reached in the low hundreds of thousands (Wilding 2025, p12). Most dramatically the North East and particularly the South West are regarded as advice deserts for the most part, while the entirety of Wales now has just 6 offices taking up legal aid work (Wilding 2025, p16-17). The situation in the rest of England is slightly improved, but not much better.
Even for those asylum seekers that manage to find a solicitor, there is a persistent trend where the advice was, at best, inadequate (UNHCR, 2025, p37). There are two ways this problem materialises. First, a 2016 Report by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) took issue with the quality of advice to asylum seekers. The report found concerning referral practices from the community or interpreters who signpost asylum seekers to poor or unregulated advice. Additionally, some advisers have insufficient legal knowledge in areas adjacent to asylum law, a lack of experience in interviewing asylum seekers, and fail to competently argue cases by not requesting expert evidence or lacking appeals experience (SRA, 2016, p3-4).
Second, poor legal advice can also be a result of legal aid lawyers being stretched, overworked and underpaid, especially during the period when legal aid only paid a fixed fee per case, forcing advisors to degrade quality of service in an effort to meet demand and ensure their financial viability (UNHCR, 2025, p37; Young Legal Aid Lawyers and Public Law Project, 2023).
As a result of the above failings, many meritorious cases are not presented adequately to the Home Office during the initial asylum claim, leading to refusals and problems at the appeal stage; as a result, a further submissions application is the only way to ameliorate the situation and for these refugees to be recognised (UNHCR, 2025, p37). But the list of circumstances giving rise to the need for the further submissions process does not end with the absent or incompetent legal representation. There are severe problems within the proverbial hornet’s nest: Home Office decision making.
Poor decision making within the Home Office
Within our second axis, there has been extensive concern about the Home Office’s decision-making quality and its ability to consistently make accurate decisions (UNHCR, 2025, p37). The concerns are a result of (a) the recent deterioration in Home Office decision-making; and (b) long-term deficiencies in Home Office decision making and practices.
The Home Office’s own data on internal decision checks shows that decision-making accuracy dropped to 52 per cent in 2023/2024, down from 72 per cent from the previous year (Quach, 2025; Yeo 2025). Additionally, the asylum appeals success rate at the First-tier tribunal during 2024-2025 hovered around 43 per cent, meaning that close to one in two initial decisions by the Home Office get overturned on appeal (Refugee Council UK, 2025), and the appeals backlog has ballooned to almost 70,000 (Wright, 2025), nearly a 750 per cent increase compared to two years ago when it was close to 8,000 according to our calculations (Refugee Council UK, 2025). The above indicate that the quality of decision-making at first instance is poor (British Red Cross, 2025; Refugee Council UK, 2025).
Furthermore, there are grave concerns over factual errors made by the Home Office. Legal advisers to asylum seekers have pointed out that there are translation errors made by interpreters used by the Home Office, and sometimes Home Office staff failed to pick up on indicators of trafficking (UNHCR, 2025, p37). Similarly, the recent measures taken to clear the backlog of cases have generated significant concern. Sometimes, the evidence submitted before asylum interviews was not considered and interviews were drastically shortened (Yeo, 2025). Concurrently, 2,500 new decision makers were recruited within nine months, yet over half reported that their training did not equip them to make refusal decisions effectively (Quach, 2025) Furthermore, interviews for applicants from some countries with high grant rates were replaced by English-language questionnaires, with the cases of those unable to read them or otherwise unable to respond within the 20-day deadline being automatically ‘withdrawn’ (Quach, 2025).
As a result of the recent deterioration, as we saw above, Home Office decision making accuracy fell to 52% in 2023-2024 -statistics not yet released by the Home Office for 2024-2025-, the appeal backlog has reached almost 70,000, application ‘withdrawals’ exploded, and the attrition rate for Home Office decision makers in November 2023 rose to 33 per cent from the usual 5 per cent (Quach, 2025).
A meta-analysis of 50 reports on Home Office decision making over the last almost 20 years identified significant long-term deficiencies in Home Office decision making and practices revolving around: (i) flawed credibility assessments; (ii) unrealistic evidentiary burdens placed on applicants; and (iii) starting point of disbelief and refusal culture (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p7).
Credibility is the core element of the adjudication of asylum applications with a supermajority of reports identifying flawed credibility assessments as a problem within the Home Office (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p8). Decision makers have been found to focus on inconsistencies within a claim to justify a negative conclusion without giving an opportunity for applicants to address the discrepancies or seek to use a lack of evidence to undermine the credibility of the entire claim (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p8). Interview techniques were found to be poor, some caseworkers failed to ask follow-up questions or clarifications when discrepancies emerged, the reasons given in refusal letters for negative credibility assessments were often not backed by evidence, and decision-makers often speculated and made unreasonable plausibility findings (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p8).
On the one hand, these flawed credibility assessments are the result of erroneous preconceptions on behalf of decision-makers and/or a lack of understanding of the contexts in which persecution can take place, who is at risk and about how they should narrate their experiences (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p8). On the other hand, Home Office decision-makers have repeatedly been found to not apply the correct standard of proof. The proper standard of proof is whether there is a real risk or likelihood that the person seeking asylum will suffer persecution if returned to their country of origin and requires the caseworker to assess the aspects of the account, determine the degree of probability attributed to these and make a holistic assessment (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p10-11). Instead, decision-makers have been found to apply a much higher standard that requires asylum seekers to prove all aspects of their claim, an unreasonable bar that the law does not require of them (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p11).
As a result of the aforementioned higher standard of proof applied in practice by caseworkers the evidential bar has risen significantly, mostly affecting people from vulnerable backgrounds (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p12). Interviews in particular, often reflected unreasonable expectations of claimants who might be strongly questioned about emotions experienced at a very early age, a considerable period of time having passed since then, and where silence or failure to directly answer the question is likely to damage a person’s credibility (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p12,14). When inconsistencies arose, decision-makers failed to consider possible reasons for these, such as difficulties to disclose or recall due to trauma (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p12).
The unreasonable evidentiary burden decision-makers place on asylum seekers is compounded by the difficulty asylum seekers can have in obtaining evidence during their fresh claim. This can be the result of: asylum seekers having poor legal advice where their lawyers have not sought the necessary evidence; the difficulty in finding a legal aid lawyer can lead asylum seekers to seek a private lawyer but not have enough money to commission an expert report; and asylum seekers not having strong evidence initially, but acquiring it during their stay in the UK through a change in their country’s situation, their activities in the UK, or medical issues (UNHCR, 2025, p37-38).
Necessarily connected with the above is the finding of a ‘refusal’ and ‘disbelief’ culture in the Home Office, with Amnesty International noting that many refusal letters were illogical in content, but implied that the asylum seeker bolstered and/or fabricated their claim; nowhere did the principle of the ‘benefit of doubt’, which is recommended as best practice by the UNHCR handbook, make an appearance (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p19). Section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration Act 2008, intended to guide credibility assessments, has encouraged an overly prescriptive approach to when, how and why credibility should be questioned, in essence, officially sanctioning the culture of disbelief (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p19). It is not surprising then that decision-makers often start from the assumption that the claimant is lying, and that the Home Affairs Committee examining the Windrush scandal found that applicants were automatically treated with suspicion and scepticism (Freedom from Torture, 2019, p19).
As a result of the above mistakes in Home Office decision-making, some spurred by a misguided rush to clear the Home Office asylum backlog and others long-standing, further submissions applications are often the only mechanism through which asylum seekers can address these errors (UNHCR, 2025, p37).
Conclusion
Overall, while the further submissions process is formally designed to consider new evidence or material capable of founding a fresh protection claim, its practical significance extends far beyond that limited function. Systemic malaises stretching across the entire spectrum of the asylum process -inaccessible legal representation due to backlogs or withdrawal of advisers from the market, incompetence where advice is available, deteriorating decision making quality by the Home Office due to measures taken to clear backlogs and a culture of disbelief towards applicants- have positioned the further submissions process as an unintentional, but irreplaceable safeguard for ensuring equitable outcomes.
If we are to ensure that the humanist values envisaged in the 1951 Refugee Convention and expanded upon by successive generations are to be realised within today’s dysfunctional asylum system, we must recognise the vital role that ‘fresh’ asylum claims play in ensuring that people seeking international protection are treated fairly and have a form of redress against systemic dysfunction and arbitrary decision making.
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Nikolaos Margaritis has been a volunteer with the Refugee Law Clinic of the University of London since 2024. He completed his LLB at Cardiff University in 2024 and his LLM at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2025. He can be contacted at margaritisnikolaos.uk@gmail.com.
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