[2025] UKUT 00349 (IAC)

Any article 8 assessment in a section 40(3) deprivation appeal needs to begin by recognising the strong public interest in protecting the integrity of British citizenship. What weighs against deprivation must nonetheless always be assessed on an individualised and case-by-case basis.

Article 8 assessments must be conducted with regard to the real world consequences for the individuals involved. In this case, this means that although there are two separate decisions, the article 8 assessment must take into account the clearly foreseeable possibility that both parents will be deprived of their citizenship at the same time. In the appellants’ statements and the statement of their eldest child, the concerns expressed about this dual deprivation relate to the impact on the family’s finances and accommodation during the limbo period. As set out above, both appellants and their daughter focused on the financial risks to their family in their article 8 arguments before the FTT. Both appellants took the same approach in their updating statements of 26 November 2024. They said that they still supported all four of their children financially, explaining that the two eldest children had been looking for work without success and the third child (now an adult) was studying but also pursuing an apprenticeship in which she was paid only the minimum wage. Mr Mujaj said

“Our business is our only source of income. We could not keep a roof over our heads or support the family without this. If me and my wife can’t work, even for a short period of time we could not manage financially.”

Similarly, Mrs Mujaj said that if her husband was unable to work “we will struggle because there is no-one to help us”. Their daughter did not make an updating statement.

Updating bank statements showed that Mr Mujaj held a running balance of over £5,000 in his current account in October and November 2024. He added around £600-700 a month and subtracted £1,200. Mrs Mujaj did not maintain a minimum balance in the same way, and every month she withdrew roughly the same amount as she deposited. If her income stopped, she would quickly be left with nothing. The couple’s mortgage payment was £825 a month. At the hearing, Mr Mujaj informed us that the balance in his current account had increased to £6,333 and that he also held an ISA account with a balance of £2,781. Their business earned around £3,000 a month. He said he had some cousins in the UK and that he had made friends over the 26 years he had lived here, but that if the family were in need, these relatives and friends would only be able to help with “small things”. Both appellants doubted that their adult children would be able to keep the business running during the limbo period, because they did not think they could find a driver to drive to Albania and back regularly, and the children would struggle to communicate with their clients because they did not speak Albanian well. Their third child earns £1,000 a month from her internship. Neither of the older two were working. Their eldest, however, had moved in with her fiancé, who was supporting her financially. She explained that she was not working because she was planning to pursue a Master’s degree.

We find that the immediate financial consequences of both parents losing their right to work would not be severe. The appellants’ combined income, according to their tax returns, has been consistently around £25,000 a year. Moreover, the eldest child is now supported by her fiancé, which will have reduced the family’s outgoings somewhat. This means that the three adult children would only need to earn a modest income in order to keep the family in the same financial position as they are in now. Although the eldest two children are not in work, there is no particular reason why they could not find some employment to help support their parents and youngest sibling, while the third child already earns almost half the parents’ declared income. Moreover, the appellants have over £8,000 in savings, which could cover their mortgage payments for nine months.

The respondent said in both decision letters that the limbo period would be “relatively short” because

“within eight weeks from the deprivation order being made, subject to any representations you may make, a further decision will be made either to remove you from the United Kingdom […] or issue leave.”

The appellants argued before us that the limbo period was likely to be considerably longer, such that the family might over time fall into real financial hardship as they exhausted their savings. We were invited to making a finding to this effect, based on the FOI response reporting an average of 257 days between the service of a deprivation order following a dismissed appeal and a grant of limited leave.

We note the respondent’s clear statement that a decision “will be made” within eight weeks from the deprivation order being made, “subject to any representations you may make”. We find that the evidence the appellant relies on is worthy of little weight and cannot support a finding that a decision is unlikely to be made within this timescale. In the first place, the FOI response was based on data up to 31 December 2020. It is beyond dispute that the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to have slowed the respondent’s decision-making significantly between March and December 2020. Moreover, the FOI response does not say when the data series being summarised began or how many total decisions were made, and there is no way to know whether there were any particularly complex or particularly straightforward cases that could have made the mean figure an unreliable indicator of the usual processing time. Mr Wilding sought to argue that the FOI response was “the respondent’s evidence” about the length of the limbo period and that the respondent could not resile from it without some updating evidence to contradict it. We disagree. The FOI response is not the respondent’s evidence about the question before us, namely, what the limbo period is likely to be for these two appellants. It is the respondent’s answer to a particular question she was asked in March 2021. It was for the appellants to persuade us that that answer is helpful in answering the question before us in April 2025. We are not persuaded that is.

Weighing the strength of the public interest in deprivation against the limited foreseeable consequences of deprivation for the appellants and their children, we find that the respondent’s decisions are not disproportionate.