1) Legal Aid: Access to legal aid in England and Wales is governed by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO). LASPO drastically curtailed the previous legal aid regime. Under LASPO, legal aid is limited to those seeking asylum or humanitarian protection and a few other groups. Applications for leave to remain as a stateless person or for British citizenship may be eligible for legal aid only if Exceptional Case Funding (ECF) is sought; but stateless persons often cannot obtain ECF without legal assistance. Legal advisers applying for ECF must work at risk that the application will not be granted, and remuneration under ECF is lower than for asylum claims, even though statelessness cases are typically as complex as asylum cases. Furthermore, because statelessness applications are out of scope for legal aid in England and Wales, fewer legal advisers develop the necessary expertise to adequately represent stateless applicants. Due to all these factors, it is often difficult for low-income or destitute stateless persons to find a legal adviser who has the necessary expertise and capacity. The position in England and Wales under LASPO contrasts sharply with the position in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where legal aid funding is provided for statelessness applications. This means that the ability of stateless people in England and Wales to access the UK’s statelessness determination procedure is limited in comparison to stateless people in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The expansion of legal aid to applications under Part 14 of the Immigration Rules would ensure better protection of stateless individuals without imposing a significant fiscal burden. From April 2013 to March 2016, 1,592 statelessness applications were made (an average of about 500 per year). In comparison, in the same time period, the UK received an average of more than 28,000 asylum claims per year. Based on these figures, bringing statelessness applications in scope for legal aid would mean an approximate 1.8% increase in cases eligible for legal aid. Even if there were an increase in the number of applications, the increase is not likely to be large given the relatively low numbers of stateless persons in the UK. 2) Right of Appeal: The quality of decision making by the Home Office in immigration, asylum, statelessness, and nationality applications is variable.1 This is especially problematic for applicants under Part 14 of the Immigration Rules as they do not normally have access to legal assistance for the preparation of applications, and the process lacks an effective appeal procedure. Currently, applicants who are unsuccessful in their initial applications may seek administrative review of the decision by the Home Office itself, followed by judicial review. However, neither of these routes provides an effective and impartial appeal. Administrative review is an internal Home Office process. A member of the staff unconnected with the initial decision reviews for “case working errors” and relays their findings to the statelessness team, which then issues a new decision (at times, essentially the same as the initial flawed decision). If administrative review does not result in a changed decision, applicants may be able to apply for judicial review by a UK court. However, the judicial process is usually lengthy and expensive for all involved, and the scope of the review is limited to whether there was a material error of law. In contrast, asylum claimants have the right to appeal to an independent tribunal, which has the jurisdiction to conduct a fresh assessment of the application, including through a review of the facts and evidence in support of the claim. Consequently, applicants for recognition as stateless persons are not afforded the same treatment as asylum claimants. There is no valid principled reason for this difference in treatment. Independent scrutiny of decisions by a tribunal empowered to re-determine points of fact and law would increase accountability of decision makers and hopefully improve decisions at the initial application stage. Furthermore, the right of appeal could foster the emergence of a more consistent body of case law and guidance on particular situations of statelessness. Legal aid and a statutory right of appeal would bring the UK’s statelessness determination procedures closer to compliance with international best practices and UNHCR recommendations: “An effective right to appeal against a negative first instance decision is an essential safeguard in a statelessness determination procedure. The appeal procedure is to rest with an independent body. The applicant is to have 1 See eg J Bezzano and J Carter, Statelessness in Practice: Implementation of the UK Statelessness Application Procedure (2018). 3