A few people have contacted BID recently looking for the 2003 'Bail Guidance Notes for Adjudicators from the Chief Adjudicator'.
The May 2003 ‘Bail Guidance Notes for Adjudicators from the Chief Adjudicator’ were produced by the former President of the AIT, then Chief Adjudicator, Henry Hodge OBE. It is BID's understanding that they were removed from the AIT website in 2007 and according to the Tribunal have since been under revision, with a new edition being prepared for publication in the summer of 2010.
However, despite their removal from the website, until February 2010 the Guidance Notes remained current practice by virtue of a statement in the AIT’s Practice Directions that until the Tribunal formulated its own guidelines, the Guidance Notes should continue to be followed. After February 2010, when the AIT transferred into the unified tribunal established by the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 (and since when bail hearings have been heard by the FTTIAC), the statement was not replicated in the ‘Consolidated Asylum and Immigration (Procedure) Rules 2005’ for the First-tier Tribunal and there were no Bail Guidance Notes on the website of the FTTIAC in the list of ‘Guidance notes for the former AIT that are now relevant to FTTIAC’. This left a gap in the guidance that was available to immigration judges about the expected conduct of a bail hearing until the release of the revised bail guidance in July 2011.
