The Asylum and Immigration Chamber of the Upper Tribunal has issued two new determinations which show that the Court of Appeal's judgment in Pankina goes much further than the UKBA seems to have grasped.
Having lost the decisive case on the lawfulness of the Points Based System the Secretary of State for the Home Department has decided not to pursue an application for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court. Instead the Immigration Rules have been amended so that the criteria which led to the challenges in Pankina and English UK have been transferred from the Policy Guidance into the Rules themselves.
As reported elsewhere on this site the UKBA has responded to recent judgments in which the methodology of the points based system was found to be unlawful not by appealing against those judgments but simply by inserting criteria which were in its policy guidance into the Immigration Rules themselves. The changes are summarised here.
The UKBA's Points Based System suffers second attack
The Court of Appeal's judgment in Pankina & others v Secretary of State for the Home Department may have holed the UKBA's points based system below the waterline
In one of its recently issued determinations the Upper Tribunal's Immigration and Asylum Chamber seems to have begun freely to express its frustration at what it sees as the idiosyncrasies of the points-based system.
The senior courts are beginning to consider the points based system and its accompanying regime of sponsorship management.
Since Monday 15 February 2010 the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal is no more. But has anything really changed?
To implement fully its "Sponsorship Management System" the UKBA has announced that after 22 February 2010 applicants for entry clearance or leave to remain as Tier 4 (Student) Migrants will no longer be able to rely on Visa Letters issued by their colleges. From then on they must get Confirmations of Acceptance for Studies, which are described in the UKBA's policy guidance as "virtual documents similar to database records."
The Asylum and Immigration Tribunal has found that it is open to people applying under the Tier 1 (Post Study Work) category of the Points Based System to rely on money they have been lent to satisfy the maintenance requirements of the Immigration Rules.