Assessing asylum claims: a critical investigation of the key factors influencing UK Home Office administrators in their decision-making processes

This research explores the decision-making of 'street-level bureaucrats' assessing asylum applications in the UK. It sets out to create new understanding of Home Office institutional culture and the extent and exercise of discretionary powers by administrators.

The introduction of restrictive immigration policies in the UK has been accompanied by the reframing of immigration law under the banner of crime and an increased criminalisation of migration (Aliverti, 2012). The 1971 Immigration Act first placed restrictions on rights afforded by the 1951 Convention (Gill and Good, 2019), and successive legislative measures informed the Immigration Act 2016 wherein a hostile environment for irregular migration became official government policy and made the preferred solution for asylum seekers repatriation, not resettlement (Hambley, 2019; Thomaz, 2018). Responsibility for assessing asylum claims lies with UK Visas and Immigration and constitutes multiple interactions with 'street-level bureaucrats' whose work is shaped by huge caseloads, shifting goals and inadequate resources and yet wield substantial discretionary authority (Lipsky, 1980). Data demonstrates that the total number of successful asylum applications in the UK has been trending negatively. Concurrently, the percentage of appeals awarded has increased steadily and, when taken in combination, these findings suggest the rationale behind rejections often fails to withstand the appeals process. This poses a question - what are the decision-making processes used by Home Office administrators?

Research Questions

What are the key factors influencing Home Office administrators in their decision-making processes?
How do Home Office administrators understand 'credibility'?
How much discretion do Home Office administrators have and how is this exercised?

The research will follow a mixed-method design analysing secondary data in the form of official statistics and also generating primary data. Observations will first be carried out in the exploratory stage at Immigration Tribunals through adopting the role of an 'unobtrusive observer'. Following this, a questionnaire will be disseminated amongst Home Office administrators to generate quantitative as well as qualitative data. A sample of individual administrators will then be selected from which detailed qualitative data will be collected through semi-structured interviews. It is acknowledged that securing research access might prove difficult. Should this prove to be the case then observations will be accompanied by a discourse analysis of a sample of HO rejection letters.

Quantitative and qualitative analyses will be used. Descriptive statistics will be drawn from baseline data on successful applications in the UK and to summarise the data from the questionnaires. Field notes from Immigration Tribunals will be collated to present a descriptive narrative of events. This, in combination with the data from the Likert scale and open-ended questions on the questionnaire, will inform the semi-structured interview schedule. Transcriptions from semi-structured interviews will be analysed thematically and include a process of coding to expand upon relevant themes and develop categories or 'analytic schema'. A document analysis of a sample of Home Office rejection letters will be used to explore the mechanisms for decision-making by Home Office caseworkers, by following an inductive and interpretive tradition.

This is an original project developing a new theoretical approach and applying criminological theory to the asylum decision-making process. This micro-level analysis, drawing directly upon the experience of those assessing asylum claims in the UK, can highlight most accurately the decision-making processes and help develop an understanding of why an increasing number of appeals are being upheld at immigration tribunal.