A day inside the clogged-up asylum court at the heart of Starmer's plans to close migrant hotels

Protests and counter-protests outside asylum hotels have spread across the country after the High Court ruled Epping Forest District Council could stop asylum seekers being housed in a hotel in the town.

But one major cause of the growing numbers in asylum hotels is rarely discussed: backlogs and delays in the appeals system. Promising to speed up the process, Keir Starmer’s government has unveiled a major overhaul, with plans to replace judges in certain asylum appeals with “professional adjudicators”.  But what happens in these appeals courts and can they be sped up?

Big Issue senior reporter Greg Barradale went to the drab heart of the asylum tribunals to find out 

The judges weren’t happy with the faces on the TV

“We reported we had difficulties with legal aid,” a lawyer on the very large screen said. “It is impossible to comply with that date because funding did not come through.” 

The judge, a woman with an auburn bob and glasses with tortoiseshell arms, shot back: “It is really quite a concern no one has mentioned legal aid being a problem at any point.” Still addressing the flat screen, which was on a stand in the middle of the room, she added: “It really is a concern that is not being taken seriously.” 

Apart from the two judges, I was the only other person in hearing room four, all blue chairs and carpets, artificial light and wood veneer tables. I had just walked into the courtroom halfway through the hearing, but the lateness wasn’t my fault. I swear. 

Read more:

• Legal aid crisis shows how utterly impossible the UK’s asylum system really is: ‘It’s so depressing’
• Could the UK government end use of asylum hotels by 2026?
• What the Epping asylum seeker hotel ruling means for Britain

I had arrived early, sat outside the courtroom, and tried to peer in to see if anybody was there. But as I pushed the door, it wouldn’t budge. A few minutes later as the 2.30pm scheduled start time came and went, a member of staff came over and tried the door again. No luck. There was nobody at the reception of Field House to tell me what was going on. Perhaps everything was just running late. 

It was only when somebody came out of the room a few minutes later, did something that looked suspiciously like unlocking the outer door, and walked out, that I realised I might be able to get in. Another member of staff confirmed that, yes, the case listed was being heard in open court, and that there was nothing stopping me going in. Was a case, supposedly open to the public, being heard behind a locked door? 

An office block for misery that may be the key to Yvette Cooper’s promises 

Field House is home to the Upper Tribunal Asylum and Immigration Chamber. Imagine a building designed to be totally nondescript, an office block for misery on a side street deep in Zone 1 of London, and you’re there. It is, despite what protests and debates and newspaper columns might claim, one of the places where we decide how we manage our borders. 

Fears over the quality of sped-up initial decisions are leading to warnings of the asylum backlog simply being moved somewhere else: the courts. As of March, there were more than 50,000 appeals against initial decisions waiting. The figure is double that of last year and almost seven times the number from 2023.

Politicians talk about being able to sort it out. If you want to get people out of hotels, that means resolving their asylum claims – and that means resolving appeals. Starmer’s government has been grappling for a solution, first boosting legal aid funding and imposing a time limit on appeals. But as hotel protests erupt and Nigel Farage calls for mass deportations, they have reached for bigger, sped up plans.  

This month, the government intends to bring forward legislation to replace judges in certain first-tier tribunal cases with “professional adjudicators” who can rapidly hear cases – potentially leaving the upper tier tribunal at Field House as the first place some asylum seekers will have their cases in front of a judge. Home secretary Yvette Cooper has said the system is dogged by “completely unacceptable delays in appeals”. Cooper said asylum seekers “stay in the system for years on end at huge cost to the taxpayer”, and that her plans would reduce the number of people in the asylum system. 

So, as protests kicked off around the country, I had a very simple plan: go and spend a day sitting at the back of the room in one of the courts where these appeals end up. What actually happens in this little-visited part of the justice system, where the thornier parts of our border issues wind up? How feasible is fast-track justice? 

Broken clocks and paper calendars: the cases get under way 

“Asylum seeker” is one of the most visible phrases in UK public life. But what does it mean? When you arrive in the UK seeking sanctuary, like 95% of those on small boats do, you become an asylum seeker while the Home Office decides whether or not to offer you protection as a refugee. While an asylum seeker, you cannot work or claim benefits, and are typically given accommodation in requisitioned hotels and a weekly allowance of £49.18 – or £9.95 if meals are provided. When the claim has been decided, many of the 53% who are refused go on appeal – initially in the first-tier tribunal, then, if unsuccessful, to the upper tier, where a case will get a slot for a hearing after a judge deems it to have merit. 

The appeals at Field House are made on the grounds of an “error of law”. In the hearings, lawyers and judges don’t go through the whole case – instead they just drill down into the points in dispute, ask questions of witnesses, or examine the evidence. 

Unlike, say, a crown court, where those involved in the case sit apart from the public and press, here everyone bar the lawyers were squeezed together on a row of chairs at the back of the room. Details of cases were scarce in advance, but it appeared the two adults with a small child sitting two seats away from me might be the same family involved in a case about having their refugee status revoked due to a dispute over their true nationality. 

What I could gather from documents – a previous ruling, matching the case number given on the listing – was that the case concerned a woman and her children who had claimed asylum in the UK as Afghan Sikhs, saying her husband had disappeared, she was pressured to change religion, and that the Taliban wanted to marry her daughters. A few months later, however, the husband reappeared in the UK and said the family had Indian passports which would allow them to live in India, where Sikhs are not deemed to be at risk. The woman and her children had their refugee status revoked on this basis in 2023, and a previous appeal had failed – as far as I could tell, an appeal against that was the case in question.

But then confusion hit, as it emerged the Home Office had apparently granted the appellant and family indefinite leave to remain – permission to stay in the UK – in November 2024. “That throws a spanner in the works,” the judge said. Nobody seemed quite sure whether that was definitely the case. After some back and forth, the lawyers were sent away to find out more details. 

On the Home Office’s end, defending the cases was the same lawyer all morning: a senior presenting officer by the name of Esen Tufan, surrounded by folders and documents on his side of the horseshoe table. Lawyers acting for the appellants came and went, but Tufan was tasked with holding down his end, nailing down his defence, and seeing them out of the attack. 

The next case appeared to be an asylum appeal – though that was, again, not made explicit, and no details appeared to be available on the Courts and Tribunals Service website. The person at the heart of the case was not in the courtroom. 

“It is a case of some significance,” the judge told the lawyers. There was consternation from the judge that an expert had not yet been instructed to produce a report. “I want this matter to be listed for a substantive hearing as soon as the tribunal can accommodate it,” she said. “This matter has been going on for too long.” 

As they talked about a date for the next hearing – suggesting a date which turned out to be a Saturday – the judge turned to the clerk. “There’s normally a paper calendar in court,” she said. “Do you have a calendar or is that the old days?” 

The judge then told the barrister to call their instructing solicitor and find out how long an expert report will take, and the barrister fetched AirPods from her bag and left the room. 

This is how the judge’s time gets used up. She appeared visibly frustrated, trying to juggle the cases and get through them all by the end of the morning’s sitting. The taxpayer can put an exact value on a judge in the Upper Tribunal Asylum and Immigration Chamber: £821.86 a day, or £180,810 a year. 

Returning to the first case, the judge told the lawyers, “It is alarming that neither party has any details on this appellant having been granted leave to remain by the secretary of state”. The judge asked what nationality had been recognised in this leave to remain. Screenshots from a Home Office email, said the lawyer, showed it was Afghan. 

“And nobody thought that was a significant piece of information that the tribunal should have been made aware of?” the judge asked. Checking for sure may be difficult, Tufan told her – the relevant people were in a team meeting. 

The uncertainty left the judge no alternative but to adjourn the case – there was to be no outcome that day, and she wanted an explanation within a week in order to decide if the case should go any further. At that point, my notes simply said, in large longhand: she is pissed off.  

The third case of the morning centred around the revocation of citizenship, being challenged under article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to a private and family life – which has been branded a “lightning rod” for attacks on the UK’s membership of the ECHR. After the Albanian-born woman whose citizenship was being stripped answered questions, her daughter gave evidence via videolink from, it emerged, a friend’s living room in Albania. Both were being asked how much financial support the mother gave her daughter, a university student. “I don’t know, but why am I being asked this?” the nonplussed daughter said at one point. 

Cases collapsing because of negligence 

Even getting to this stage takes a long time. Lawyers tell asylum seekers challenging a refusal to expect a wait of just over a year before their first-tier appeal is heard. The first-tier tribunal got through 11,000 cases from January to March 2025, an increase of 15%, with asylum cases increasing by 79%. However, when it comes to judicial reviews at least, the upper tier actually manages to get through more cases than it receives. 

But even before that, a fall in positive decision rates at the initial stage – down from 76% in 2022 to 47% in 2025 – is driving people into the courts, Tara Wolfe, head of the medico-legal reports team at Freedom from Torture, told Big Issue. “There’s a really clear link there between poor decision-making by the Home Office leading to everyone appealing their decision and ending up in court.”  

Ana Gonzalez, head of immigration at Wilson Solicitors, told us: “I had a number of cases, because of complete negligence of the Home Office, my clients ended up in the appeal system when they shouldn’t have been.” 

That’s no good for the clients. “It’s really detrimental to their mental health,” Gonzalez added, saying she’ll have long-standing clients who she has seen years later but not recognised, such was the dramatic, visible improvement in their health after being out of the system. 

Unlike the first-tier tribunal, where cases are not publicly listed, the upper tier is the first place where the decisions themselves are published online. The cases are complex, with knotty outcomes, as shown by the most recent judgment handed down as I wrote this story. 

It concerned an Iranian refugee refused asylum, who was two appeals deep in the process. He had been attending protests in London against the regime, posting pictures on Facebook of himself. He was found to have carried out political activities in “bad faith”. But, the ruling said, “even if the appellant’s activities have been undertaken in bad faith, he will be perceived by the Iranian authorities as a separatist activist committed to the Kurdish cause.” Removing him would breach the UK’s obligations under the Refugee Convention, said the judges. The appeal was allowed, and the Home Office must reconsider. 

Ask anyone who deals with the courts regularly why they seem not to work, and most will point to one thing: Underfunding. It is against this context that Cooper’s fast-track justice pledges have been made. 

Gonzalez said they are “not very realistic”, adding: “Either the government has very short memories, or they’re being very facetious trying to out-Reform Reform, saying things they know will appeal to the general public. 

“At the end of the day it’s very clear that asylum seekers are seen as a massive inconvenience. They’ve been completely demonised.” 

Wolfe worried that, while more speed was a worthy principle, it could come at a price. “Speed and efficiency can’t come at the expense of procedural fairness, and some of the changes that are being proposed will come at that cost, as well as being unrealistic in practice,” she said. 

“I think this focus on, well let’s just speed up the appeal process, is actually probably just going to lead to further backlogs, if anything. Because there’s going to be poor decision-making at appeal stage, because people won’t have had time to adequately prepare.” 

‘Great concern’ as delays threaten to push cases off rails 

When I got through the door after lunch, the case was in full swing. 

From what I could gather, it concerned three asylum seekers from Iraq, known only as AH, AJ and AK. They were not here. This was not the hearing. It was a case management hearing, setting the field of play for their asylum appeal. And it didn’t appear to be going well. 

Judges complained they hadn’t been told that deadlines would be difficult to meet. Lawyers on the call muted themselves, trying to reach experts via phone to check in on dates. Letters were being returned to the court undelivered. The judge said one of the claimants had been homeless for a period of time. 

“It is of great concern we are being pushed into a position where we are told that is difficult,” the judge said as she laid out deadlines to – hopefully – have a proper hearing in September.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

It’s helping people with disabilities. 

It’s creating safer living conditions for renters.

It’s getting answers for the most vulnerable.

Big Issue brings you trustworthy journalism that drives real change. 

If this article gave you something to think about, help us keep doing this work from £5 a month.