Part 9 of the Immigration Rules consists of a long list of reasons why someone can be refused permission to enter or stay in the UK. These are known as the “general grounds for refusal”. Part 9 was recently overhauled, with the Home Office simultaneously making cosmetic and substantive changes to the general grounds.

On the cosmetic side, the existing rules have been rewritten and restructured. (The word “general’ no longer appears in the title to Part 9, for one thing, so my terminology is already out of date.) Gone are the familiar reference points for lawyers: paragraph 320, paragraph 322(5) and all the rest of it. But more to the point, and hard to spot amid the general reorganisation, the substance of many of the rules has also been changed — in many cases to make it easier to dish out a refusal.

That’s the subject of this episode of the podcast. I spoke to Alex Piletska from Turpin Miller, who has been painstakingly working through all the changes to bring our OISC training materials on the subject up to date. Her general assessment is that the Home Office has made things stricter overall. But there are some silver linings buried in there which seem to make some individual grounds for refusal more lenient — so it’s not all bad news, for a change.