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Hackney Migrant Centre Annual Report 2016
our year The biggest demand on our service continues to be immigration advice. Many of our visitors want to regularise their immigration status but legal aid for this is generally unavailable, so applicants also have to pay legal costs on top of constantly rising fees for immigration applications. Migrants applying for Limited Leave to Remain (30 months only) have to pay a Health Surcharge of £500 on top of an application fee of £811 per person. Without free immigration advice at our drop-in, many of our visitors would be unable to obtain any legal help for further immigration claims.
Our partner, Islington Law Centre, took on the immigration cases of 17 of our visitors, and over 100 others were directed to other reputable solicitors. Given that very few projects provide pro bono legal support, we are increasingly requesting legal aid funding for particularly exceptional cases which do not come under the usual eligibility criteria. We submitted almost 20 of these applications in the past year. This year we launched a new five-year ‘Moving out of Hardship’ project, generously funded by the Big Lottery Fund. We are excited to be collaborating with Coram Children’s Legal Centre and Haringey Migrant Support Centre in this. The scheme has enabled us to employ a second welfare caseworker and provided funds for an immigration solicitor specialising in working with families. By the end of the first year the project aims to have provided shortterm interventions to over 500 families, and follow-up casework to over 200 of them.