The visa brake judgement sheds light on Home Office decision-making

Last week’s High Court ruling – Sadat & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department – saw a group of prospective students from countries affected by the “visa brake” have their legal challenge to the Home Office policy dismissed.

The grounds for the different challenges were various, including the way that the Home Office calculated which countries’ nationals should be affected, and failure to have regard to the brake’s discriminatory impact on women.

The claims were heard on a “rolled-up” basis at the end of July, which both considered whether permission should be granted to apply for judicial review and considering the merits of the claims. Overall, all but two of the claims were granted permission to apply for review, but at the same time the claims were dismissed.

On the way the countries had been selected, Justice Steyn found that the Home Office’s approach had been “within the range of reasonable methodologies.” But the judgement and the accompanying government submissions outlining how the policy was developed shed more light on how exactly the visa brake came into place than has been made public thus far.

While the visa brake did not appear in the May 2025 immigration white paper, we learn that it was already being explored earlier in the spring by the Home Office’s System Integrity Standing Group. In July 2025, the department – on a commission from Number 10 – produced a paper addressing the issue of “visa-linked asylum claims” (such as when a student visa-holder subsequently goes on to apply for asylum from within the UK). Three “more radical options” are said to have been floated in this paper: an emergency brake, “immigration bonds”, and “nationality differentiation”. No further details are given in the judgement about the latter two.

The same paper suggested that the most likely options for which nationalities would have student visas blocked are those “where the ratio between visas issued and visa-linked claims are very high, particularly where overall volumes are high” – and it was suggested that, under this approach, Bangladesh and Pakistan stand out.

Policy development in August and September 2025 explored other models which would have been more sophisticated than a blanket ban by nationality, such as “interventions based on courses and occupation codes” or controls on specific sponsors – but it’s noted that these would be operationally complex.

The Home Office’s October ministerial statement had already landed on the four countries which would be in the first wave of the brake – Afghanistan, Cameroon, Sudan and Myanmar – as well as Syria and Iran. This was based on a metric of 100+ asylum claims from visa holders over the year where this amounted to 15 per cent or more of the total number of visas issued in the same period (as was previously made public in the impact assessment, and became one of the central questions of the attempt for judicial review).

But it’s clear from the statement (which only circulated internally within government) that the department was considering how it could go further:

Bangladesh is also a possibility. Pakistan is harder to make a case for, but not impossible. India is very challenging in that the ratio for Indian Work and Study visa holders is 1% and 3%. We are also working to see if we can refine this trigger further by targeting specific university courses and/or occupation codes, to make the intervention more surgical and potentially make the stakeholder and diplomatic handling easier.

Iran was later excluded for unspecified reasons – the judgement simply states that “the Secretary of State subsequently decided to exclude [Iran] from the Visa Brake for reasons that are not relevant to these claims” – and when the metric was recalculated in December using figures from the year ending September 2025, Syria was excluded as there had only been 80 asylum claims linked to visas in the this period (though there were more than 100 in each of the four calendar years 2021–24 and it had a higher ratio of claims to visas than some of the other countries).

The judgement then refers to a Home Office communiqué from January, which spells out how diplomatic and economic concerns also played a role in decision-making:

Bangladesh also met the threshold for consideration for both work and study, but the Secretary of State had agreed in October ‘to defer its assessment to stage two of this process’. This was because ‘the UK has deeper bilateral equities with Bangladesh, such that any action on Bangladesh would likely incur a far more pronounced impact on relations, as well as jeopardise other priorities such as maintaining and enhancing our returns cooperation’. Delaying assessment to stage two would allow time for a more comprehensive analysis of the ‘economic, diplomatic and migration considerations.’

We noted at the time of the visa brake that, buried in the original decision documents, the initial deployment of the policy was described as merely the “first phase”.

It’s clear that other countries were in the Home Office’s crosshairs, and may be again in future rounds. It also comes across that the process for selecting the initial four had quite a degree of contingency – though, while it’s been reported that the seven claimants are considering an appeal, last week’s judgement shows that the department has no small leeway in devising a process for identifying which nationalities to apply the brake to.

Perhaps most notably, we see too that the Home Office is not against more targeted approaches, potentially based on sponsoring organisations or subjects areas, if it can find ways to practically implement them.