The Immigration Practitioner’s Group of solicitors in Northern Ireland have gone on strike from 4 February 2025, for an indefinite period. This strike has been called because legal aid rates have not increased since 1982 – making work in this field increasingly unsustainable.

This strike means that legal services will no longer be provided in Northern Ireland to ongoing cases where the person does not yet have a date for their asylum substantive interview. Legal services in Immigration Tribunals will also no longer be provided while the strike is ongoing.

Understandably, this news has caused panic across Northern Ireland, raising questions about what this will mean for people seeking asylum and those supporting them. 

Right to Remain and Law Centre Northern Ireland Workshop

It was immediately obvious how high the demand was for this type of session – we soon had almost 100 people signed up, which is the maximum capacity for a Zoom meeting. This gave us a clear indication of just how needed this session was, and how important it was to bring people together given the current context.

First we heard from Niamh, Community Engagement Officer at LCNI who introduced the purpose of the session and outlined what we know about the solicitor’s strike. Rather than wait for the strike to end and for the legal aid capacity to be restored, the immediate focus must be on building confidence and capacity in offering basic legal support to people navigating the asylum system. As a result of this strike, people will be more likely to navigate the asylum system without legal advice, and they will be reliant on key resources to do so, such as the Right to Remain Toolkit. 

After a short run through of the agenda and plan for the session, our Community Organiser Maggy introduced the Right to Remain Toolkit: an essential and trusted resource for navigating the immigration and asylum system. Maggy emphasised the 5 things to know when sharing the Toolkit: 

• Phone friendly 
• Available in many languages
• Every page has an Action Section with practical tips
• Search bars to find what you are looking for 
• We have a YouTube channel

Our Legal Education Officer Leah then led an interactive exercise on how to use the Toolkit. This exercise is designed to give participants confidence to use the Search Bars in the Toolkit to find information on specific topics. Using the search bars, participants searched for information on specific topics, such as ‘substantive interview’, ‘evidence’ or ‘permission to work’. This exercise helps to highlight the best way to use the Toolkit – by targeting specific topics and picking out the information that is most relevant to you or the person you are supporting.

For the next section of the session, called ‘Toolkit Testimony’, we heard from David in Manchester. David shared his experience of using the Toolkit without a legal representative to represent himself at the appeal stage. The information in the Toolkit prepared David for what to expect on the day of his appeal: what to take with him and how the court process would work. Before meeting Maggy, and learning about Right to Remain, David had struggled for many years with the asylum system, and received bad legal advice. David’s appeal was successful, and he was granted refugee status at appeal after representing himself. We are so grateful to David for sharing his story with us, and for continuing to inspire others to use the Right to Remain Toolkit and learn about their rights.

After that, our Legal Education Officer Leah led a session on Legal Advice and Legal Support. This exercise is designed to help participants get to grips with the distinction between legal advice and legal support, and to understand how they can increase their ability to offer legal support, which does not require legal training and is not regulated. In order to do this, groups considered a number of scenarios and had to discuss whether they thought they were legal advice or legal support. 

This exercise always generates lively discussion and consideration, and for many people this was the first time they were considering the distinction between legal advice and legal support.

We received the following feedback on this exercise:

Feedback and next steps

As well as introducing the Toolkit, and providing practical case studies of how the Toolkit can be used to provide legal support where there is no access to legal advice, this workshop was an opportunity for organisations and individuals working in Northern Ireland to respond to this current crisis, and share concerns, experiences and advice. 

We gathered some feedback from participants on the session, a snapshot of which is shared below:

What are you going to do with the information or connections you have gained today?

Share to every contact I have. Might be a friend of a friend but there are people out there with limited access to organisations such as Right to Remain

Use this to support a particular individual who has the substantive interview coming up

Pass on the details of the toolkit to those asking questions at foodbank I help at

Consider incorporating an exercise on using this toolkit into our digital skills training programme (part of our employability training)

Thank you to LCNI for inviting us to co-deliver this workshop. We recognise this is going to be a difficult period as the strikes continue. We stand in solidarity with all those navigating the UK’s asylum and immigration system, and those supporting them. 

All across the UK there is a massive deficit in legal aid provision. This means that the quality of and access to legal advice has been declining for some time. The UK government has been made well aware of this problem, and introduced an uplift to the legal aid provision in England and Wales in November 2024, which is woefully insufficient to address the enormity of the problem.

The numbers of unrepresented people going through the asylum and appeals process across the UK remains very high, and for this reason people will continue to rely on resources like the Right to Remain Toolkit to help them navigate the legal process without a lawyer.