‘Need to Know — Immigration UK’ is an information resource solution for those that need to use ‘Hostile Environment’ era UK immigration services (Home Office & Immigration Tribunal, and related).

It is also for all (from parliament and immigration law lawyers to UK and international human rights organisations & groups to specific Hostile Environment implementers targeted groups from Windrush Scandal victims and LGBT targeted victims to Gurkhas) actively involved in seeking revocation of the Hostile Environment and lobbying for institution of professional, effective humane UK immigration services.

In part the work of a number of different organisations and many individual contributors with direct experience of the Whitehall (hub of UK government services delivery) planned, delivered and protected Hostile Environment, the online resource — released in two phases (Phase One at the end of November 2019, and Phase Two in the February/March 2020 period) — and a more comprehensive e-book version (to be released in the February/March 2020 period).

The resource is an information-based solution to practical needs in real life of real people, and also those making and evaluating policy, regarding delivery of immigration services that are provided in ways outside of the traditional normal professional standards that used to apply with UK immigration, as a result of the institution of the so-called ‘Hostile Environment.’ The latter, instituted in 2012, implemented by the UK Home Office immigration agencies, particularly the UK Visa & Immigration (UKVI) in the UK and overseas (the latter administered as a facet of Foreign & Commonwealth [FCO] services), and the UK Border Force & Immigration Enforcement (IE), and also de-facto by in particular the HMCTS Immigration Tribunal, and tertiary agencies and sub-contracted businesses. 

The perspective of the creators of this information resource, all of whom have direct experience of the Hostile Environment, is that the latter is an anomaly, that has been comprehensively proven to be targeted overwhelmingly at genuine applicants and appellants, and that it constitutes an existential threat to parliamentary democracy, the credibility of the UK justice system, and the reputation of the UK as a human-rights respecting country.

As such the resource is much needed, and no comparable one-stop information point has existed until the time of its creation (August 2019) for annually the many thousands of people inside and outside the UK who find themselves accessing or having to use different facets of UK immigration.

It also provides an invaluable ‘mirror’ for UK immigration services and Immigration Tribunal providers from frontline to strategic leads, and to those entities that assess, scrutinise, evaluate all of the latter on the basis of perceived differences between customer/service users care & protections related policy statements of the UK government and immigration tribunal online and printed material (including senior civil servants and ministers, and Tribunal senior officers relevant formal letters and communications), and actual operational level realities as experienced by people in the real world.