 A lack of legal aid for stateless persons applying for leave to remain. Research conducted by the Liverpool Law School also identified serious concerns regarding poor and inconsistent decision making and a lack of legal aid.xc Despite its shortcomings, the existence of an SDP and a pathway to naturalisation for stateless persons in the UK stands in stark contrast to the absence of mechanisms for identifying and protecting stateless people in Australia. As noted by Joanna Bezzano and Judith Carter in their 2018 comprehensive review of the UK’s Statelessness Application Procedure, the UK is ahead of many countries in having a statelessness determination procedure; the lives of stateless individuals and families in the UK have dramatically improved through a grant of statelessness leave.xci Yet the procedure is not working as well as it should.xcii Australia has a valuable opportunity to learn from the issues identified with the UK’s SDP and ensure that any SDP developed for Australia addresses these, ensuring efficient, fair and transparent decision-making procedures and timeframes, high quality decision making and adequate legal aid for stateless people seeking to navigate the process. Case Study – Living Stateless in the UK – Tarek (Taken from the European Network on Statelessness’ 2021 Report ‘Invisible Kids: Childhood Statelessness in the UK’, available here.xciii) Tarek’s mother and father are stateless Palestinians/Tarek was born in the UK at a time when his parents had no leave to remain. One of his parents applied for asylum with the rest of the family as dependents, but the Home Office refused this application. The family later applied for leave to remain in the UK as stateless persons, under Part 14 of the Immigration Rules, and this was granted. The family lived in Home Office accommodation with very basic financial support for approximately two years. When he turned five, Tarek became eligible to register as a British citizen as a child born stateless in the UK. 47