Last updated: 20 August 2024
Only people accredited (this means qualified) with a regulatory body such as the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner (OISC) can give immigration legal advice.
However, there are lots of things that friends or supporters can do to help someone with their immigration / asylum case without providing legal advice. We call this help “legal support”.
This page has been written to help people who want to provide legal support around asylum / immigration processes do so safely and without stepping into providing legal advice. This page is not about all types of legal advice.
On this page, you will find the following information:
What is legal advice?
Legal advice can be defined as the application of legal rules and principles to a specific set of facts that proposes a course of action. Legal advice is specific, direct, and proposes a course of action. This means it suggests to someone what they should do.
There are different qualifications for providing legal advice in different areas of law.
Who can give (immigration) legal advice?
You must be qualified to provide immigration legal advice, but the nature of this qualification varies.
- You may receive legal advice from a registered immigration adviser (like a caseworker) who is registered under the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner (OISC) or a member of an approved professional body, like the Law Society.
- You may receive legal advice from a solicitor (a type of lawyer), who specialises in immigration law. They may be working privately (you pay them directly), under a Legal Aid contract (you don’t pay them, the government does), or pro bono (for free).
- You may receive legal advice from a barrister (a lawyer that represents you in court). They may be working privately under the Direct Access scheme (you pay them directly), under a Legal Aid contract (you don’t pay them, the government does), or pro bono (for free).
You can learn more about advisers, lawyers, and legal advice in our Toolkit page.
What is legal support?
If you are not qualified to provide legal advice, you can still provide support to someone who has an asylum / immigration case.
Legal support is taking action without giving legal advice. It can include understanding and passing on general legal information, or even providing emotional, moral, and practical support to someone as they move through the legal process.
General legal information is factual, generic (not specific to the person) and does not suggest any specific next steps. For example, by sharing the information in the Toolkit, explaining how the asylum and immigration system works, what the most recent country guidance case on a certain country is, or explaining what an injunction is. This is not providing legal advice (telling someone what to do); it is sharing information to enable them to be better informed in making their own choice(s).
Why it’s important to know the difference between advice and support
There are a number of reasons why people who are not qualified should not be providing immigration legal advice.
If you are not a qualified immigration adviser or legal professional, you may not have the necessary up-to-date knowledge to provide the correct advice. Immigration is a complex area of law, and even if the facts of some cases seem similar, you may miss something out or misunderstand a legal rule. If you give someone the wrong advice, you could be putting them at risk of serious harm. Wrong advice can be worse than no advice.
It is also a criminal offence to give legal advice if you are not qualified to do so. In some instances, this can result in imprisonment.
It is also important to know how much you can do to support someone even if you cannot provide them with legal advice. In the UK, there is currently a Legal Aid crisis: most people who are eligible for Legal Aid are not able to find a legal representative. As a result, people in support positions (volunteers and staff at charities, foodbanks, friendship groups etc) often feel helpless in that they are not able to provide legal advice to the people they are working with. Many legal issues also are not covered by Legal Aid (e.g., most immigration applications, refugee family reunion).
However, understanding legal support shows us just how much we can do to support people without giving legal advice – and this in turn empowers our communities.
Even if the advice you are giving does not fall into the category of “legal advice”, remember that the person seeking the right to remain should be making all the decisions for themselves. Even if someone asks for your advice, try not to tell them what to do but instead give information about their options. You can give information about the benefits and risks of the various options, and then support them in making the decision themselves.
ACTION SECTION (examples of legal support)
There are many things that people can do to provide legal support to someone who has an asylum or immigration issue, without giving legal advice.
Something important to bear in mind when carrying out these (or any other) actions to support someone is: do you have their consent to help?
You can:
- Help someone gather evidence needed for a fee waiver application.
- Support a care worker to find a new sponsor, using this tool.
- Provide information to someone about the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) visa condition, and how to apply to have the condition lifted.
- Help someone study for the Life In the UK test.
- Provide general legal information (you can use this Toolkit guide to do this)
- Before somebody makes an asylum claim or immigration application, or while they are going through the process, you can sit down with them to go through the different stages and what can happen at each stage.
- Collect and/or research evidence on a country of origin or particular situation of the person you are supporting.
- Use your contacts to ask an expert to write a report to support the legal case.
- Help gather useful letters for the case – this might be from a school, Social Services, medical or mental health professionals, community groups. To learn more about writing support letters, read our Legal Updates blog post here.
- Read someone’s Home Office refusal letter or court judgment and point out which parts of their story are being doubted, and find/understand case law or guidelines that these documents refer to
- Explain (or look up together) the meaning of technical terms in legal documents
- Type up what someone wants to say in response to a Home Office refusal, or other negative decision, especially if they find written English difficult. You can also help them write emails asking for extensions / further information from the Home Office.
- Help someone prepare for an asylum or immigration interview. For more tips on this, please see our Asylum Substantive Interview page.
- Help someone prepare a plan for in case they are detained, and agree a plan of action for if they are detained.
- Visit someone if they are detained. You can learn more about this by looking at the work of the Association of Visitors to Immigration Detainees (AVID). They have a Knowledge Hub and Handbook.
You will find more information about all of these actions as you go through this guide.
To learn more about legal support, read our Legal Update blog post on this topic.