News

17.06.2020 - Mastercard and Visa face billion-pound payouts to retailers after top court case in the UK

Retailers including Asda and Argos are in line for potential billion-pound payouts after the UK’s highest court ruled that transaction fees charged by Visa and Mastercard breached competition laws.

The UK's top judges ruled in favour of retailers including J Sainsbury Plc in a blow to credit-card companies that could now face billions of pounds in damages.

The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., ruling that fees the companies were charging shops restrict competition.

The long-running litigation now allows Sainsbury as well as other supermarkets including Wal-Mar...

17.06.2020 - Coronavirus: Bank pumps £100bn into UK economy to aid recovery

The Bank of England increased its bond-buying programme by a further 100 billion pounds on Thursday (18 June) to help steer the economy away from its record coronavirus slump, but sharply slowed the pace of its purchases.

Bank policymakers voted 8-1 to increase the size of its bond-buying programme.

However, they said there was growing evidence that the hit to the economy would be "less severe" than initially feared.

The Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) also kept interest rates at a record low of 0.1%.

The UK economy shrank by 20.4% in April, while official jobs data showed the number of...

17.06.2020 - Immigration Health Surcharge refunds for NHS and social care workers

When the government announced on 21 May 2020 that NHS and social care workers would be made exempt from the Immigration Health Surcharge, some immigration lawyers pointed out that a political announcement is one thing, legal implementation quite another. They reminded us that “history has shown that the pressure needs to be applied even more once the grand gesture has been made”. To take one recent example, an immigration concession for people from Northern Ireland was promised in January 2020 but the actual amendments to the Immigration Rules making it happen will not come into force until la...

15.06.2020 - Extended family members can’t have any breaks in dependency on EU citizen sponsor

Reading judgments from the Upper Tribunal on the EEA Regulations often feels like going back in time. A lot of the recent case law has clarified points of law in favour of migrants but almost all have come far too late to be useful.

The latest case of Chowdhury (Extended family members: dependency) [2020] UKUT 188 (IAC) gives us the worst of both worlds. It comes to us years later than it should have and has the scope to dramatically restrict the ability of extended family members to qualify for EU settled status. In this case, the Upper Tribunal has confirmed that extended family members need...

14.06.2020 - Do coronavirus visa extensions properly, MPs urge

“The Home Office must clarify the legal basis for the offers of visa extensions”, says the Home Affairs committee of MPs in a coronavirus report published today.

The committee points out that there is considerable uncertainty about whether the department has the legal power to offer coronavirus visa extensions in the way it has done and calls for a statutory instrument to put the matter beyond doubt. Legal experts gave evidence to the inquiry and suggested that what looks like a visa extension could, in legal terms, be only a policy decision not to punish overstaying when caused by the pandemi...

14.06.2020 - Coronavirus: more than a million left out of income support, say MPs

The Treasury should act to help more than a million people who have fallen through the cracks in the government’s Covid-19 income support schemes, according to a report by an influential group of MPs.

The MPs called on Sunak to address the gaps in his coronavirus job retention scheme (CJRS) and self-employment income support scheme (SEISS).

The MPs said they recognised that Sunak’s costly financial support packages had been welcome to many of those unable to work due to the lockdown of the economy, but found that “rolling out financial support at pace and scale has inevitably resulted in some ...

14.06.2020 - Application from outside the UK: The validity period of the vignette visa sticker is extended to 90 days

Although not all UK visa application centres located outside the UK are fully open yet, and they are only gradually re-opening, however, the following rule comes into force from today and will be in effect until the end of this year.

If your 30 day visa to travel to the UK for work, study or to join family has expired, or is about to expire, you can request a replacement visa with revised validity dates free of charge until the end of this year.

To make a request, contact the Coronavirus Immigration Help Centre by email CIH@homeoffice.gov.uk in English language. You’ll need to include your nam...

11.06.2020 - Britain's GDP falls 20.4% in April as economy is paralysed by lockdown.

Britain’s economy shrank by a record 20.4% in April as the first full month of the coronavirus lockdown triggered an economic crash three times greater than the 2008 financial crisis.

Revealing the scale of the downturn, the official figures for gross domestic product (GDP) from the Office for National Statistics showed no area of the economy was left unscathed as the government imposed tight controls on business and social life to limit the spread of the disease.

The decline was the largest since comparable monthly records began in 1997 and was more than triple the previous record fall of 5.8...

11.06.2020 - Coronavirus and the UK immigration system (as of 12 June 2020)

Immigration tribunal hearings

 First-tier Tribunal

Back on 21 March, President of the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration & Asylum Chamber) Michael Clements wrote to the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association to say that hearings are to go remote:

From Wednesday, 25th March onwards, there will be no face to face hearings listed in any centre. Applications for bail and emergency work will continue to be given priority but, save in exceptional circumstance, applications and hearings will be conducted remotely.

The President also issued Practice Statement Note No 1 2020: Arrangements during the ...

08.06.2020 - UK households face £6bn debts because of Covid-19, says charity/ Almost £38 million support package for debt advice providers helping people affected by Coronavirus.

British households are expected to rack up debts worth a combined £6bn because of the coronavirus crisis, as millions of people fall behind on credit card payments, council tax and utility bills.

Sounding the alarm as the economic fallout from the health emergency mounts, the StepChange debt advice charity said 4.6m households risked building up dangerous levels of debt because of the pandemic.

The charity warned that debts racked up during the crisis would stifle the country’s economic recovery and that debt advisory services would be deluged once the reality of people’s situations began to h...

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