Immigration and Asylum Graduated Fee Scheme

On this page:

About this fee scheme
Key amendments
Fee levels
Additional payments
Excluded services
For more information

About this fee scheme

This fee scheme applis to all immigration cases started and the majority of asylum cases lodged with the Home Office on or after 1 October 2007.

The fees have been calculated by:

mapping the processes that an immigration or asylum application would routinely follow
the corresponding services that we would expect to be provided.

Full details of the fee schemes are in 'Legal Aid Reform: Final Immigration & Asylum, and Mental Health Fee Schemes' under Documents along with Fee tables are under Documents.

A Regulatory Impact Assessment and accompanying appendices are under Documents.

Key amendments

Key amendments to the fees published in our consultation Legal Aid: A Sustainable Future include:

the removal of interpreter and translation costs from the asylum fee - these will now be paid as disbursements
a baseline hourly rate set three quarters between current national and London rates to better reflect the geographical distribution of cases
the lowering of the exceptional case limit from four time to three times the fee payable
an amended formula for rounding, where we round fees to the nearest £5 instead of the nearest £50 – this is fairer for providers.

Fee levels

For both immigration and asylum cases the scheme fixes fees for two different stages of what is currently Controlled Work:

Legal Help: advice and assistance on immigration, nationality, asylum, deportation and terms of entry to stay in the UK
Controlled Legal Representation (CLR): preparation and advocacy for proceedings before the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT) but excluding onward appeals, which will continue under current arrangements.

There is a single fee for Legal Help and two fees for Controlled Legal Representation, depending on the point at which the case concludes. There are separate fees for immigration and asylum work.

Additional payments

Additional fixed payments will be made for representation at:

the Home Office Interview (when within scope)
an oral Case Management Review Hearing (CMRH)
a telephone CMRH
a substantive Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT) hearing
adjourned hearings which are part-heard or re-listed.

All disbursements (including interpreter and translation costs) in both asylum and immigration cases will be paid outside the fee schemes. These will be limited to financial thresholds.

Travel and waiting is included in the fees. Travel to visit detained clients will be paid separately where not covered by the fee.

The 5% uplift still applies to all casework undertaken under an immigration contract by an Advanced Caseworker under the Immigration and Asylum Accreditation Scheme.

We will not provide an early resolution payment for asylum cases. Instead the money will be reinvested into the scheme as a whole.

Exceptional cases

In response to concerns raised we have reduced the exceptional case threshold to three times the graduated fee (minus additional payments) for both immigration and asylum cases.

We have achieved this without reducing the fee levels. Cases at or above the exceptional limit will be paid on current hourly rates.

Excluded services

There will be separate contracting arrangements for the 25% of asylum cases not subject to mainstream processes and services:

advice and representation for detainees
information, advice and representation at the Asylum Screening Unit (ASU)
advice and representation for Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children (UASC).

We have provided for the payment of cases that move between graduated fees to excluded services.

Detention

We remain committed to the proposals for providing services for clients in detention through exclusive contracts. We are consulting on the provision of services in Immigration Removal Centres.

Bid rounds for these contracts will be held later this year so contracts can come into effect in October 2007. We will publish the bid rounds on this website.

Current contracts for services for detained clients (including those subject to the fast-track process) and telephone advice in police stations will be extended until October 2007.

An evaluation of the On-site Detention Advice pilot can be found under Documents.

Asylum claims

We remain committed to providing services at the Asylum Screening Unit (ASU) and for Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children (UASC) through exclusive arrangements.

Before further development of proposals for these areas, we will await Home Office proposals for the future of these services.

Other exclusions

We propose that certain services such as form filling and applying for Judicial Review are excluded from the graduated scheme but may be carried out by all immigration providers.

Where in scope, these services will be paid an hourly rate subject to cost limits set out in the specification.

For more information

Visit the CLS>Civil areas of work>Immigration and asylum pages for more information including the Immigration Advice at the Police Station pilot.

Last updated: 04 June 2009