Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessments are undertaken to ensure that decisions to classify immigration cases as complex comply with the Equality Act 2010.

Where an application is defined as non-straightforward due to complexity, the customer will be written to within the normal processing time to explain why it will not be decided within the normal standard, and to explain what will happen next.

All leave to remain applications that seek to rely upon Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and applications outside of the rules are deemed non-straightforward (or ‘complex’). On the introduction of the current Article 8 rules (Appendix FM), in July 2012, a Policy Equality Statement was published demonstrating how these rules complied with the Equality Act 2010.