A High Court judge has rejected every ground of appeal brought by a Pakistani national who sought damages for 50 days in immigration detention in 2016 and 2017. The judgment upholds the Home Office, but its own record of how the case was handled shows a department whose files did not agree with one another, and a dispute that took almost ten years to finish.
The ruling
On 6 November 2026 Mr Justice Ritchie handed down judgment in Mohammed Akram Arain v The Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 2853 (KB), an appeal in the King’s Bench Division of the High Court. Mr Arain had sued the Home Secretary for false imprisonment, claiming damages and aggravated damages for what his pleaded case described as 50 days of detention between 21 November 2016 and 9 January 2017. His Honour Judge Saggerson dismissed the claim after a two-day trial and gave judgment on 24 September 2025. Mr Arain appealed on five grounds. Ritchie J dismissed all five, writing: “I dismiss every ground of appeal” (judgment, para. 51).
The case matters for two reasons. It sets out, in plain terms, what a person suing the Home Office over detention must actually allege before the department has to justify itself. And it records, in the department’s own case notes, how an immigration officer detained a man while writing that there was no information on file about an appeal the Home Office had itself recorded five months earlier.
What the coverage has missed
RSN’s searches found no press coverage of the judgment in the days after it was published on the National Archives’ Find Case Law service. That is not unusual for a liability appeal in a detention claim. It is a pity, because the judgment answers a question that rarely gets a straight answer: when a detention claim against the Home Office fails, why does it fail?
Here the answer was not that the Home Office was faultless. The trial judge found, and Ritchie J accepted, that there “was some confusion about the appeal in the Defendant’s staff notes” (para. 25). The claim failed because the documents, read as a whole, showed that the appeal had been considered, because the law did not treat that kind of appeal as a bar to removal, and because the claimant’s lawyers never pinned their case to any specific rule or policy the department was said to have broken.
Background: a refused visa and a finding of fraud
The facts below are taken from the judgment. Mr Arain entered the United Kingdom lawfully on 16 July 2013 and married a British citizen the same year. The couple had children in 2014 and 2015.
His first application for leave to remain, made on 10 January 2014, “was refused due to a fraud which he practised when passing his English Language Test” (para. 8). Further representations based on family life were refused on 21 September 2015, “in part due to his previous fraud.” By then, the judgment records, “He was no longer entitled to remain in the UK” (para. 8).
Ritchie J noted that an earlier judgment by HHJ Kelly in 2015 “included adverse findings about fraud by the Claimant in his immigration process” and that this judgment and order “were not appealed” (para. 19). He also recorded that the trial judge “noted that the Claimant’s fraud by proxy over the English Language Test was part of a wider enquiry into the integrity of such testing” (para. 19).
Mr Arain was detained for 13 days in December 2015 and released. He sought judicial review of the refusal of his further representations. Permission was refused on the papers and again at a renewal hearing in May 2016. He then appealed that refusal to the Court of Appeal. The judgment notes that “Such appeals generally have slim prospects” and that “The Defendant was told of the Appeal in June 2016 and made a record of that” (para. 8).
Deep dive: what the Home Office’s own records show
On 21 November 2016 Mr Arain was detained when he reported to the Home Office. The planned place of detention was recorded as Becket House in London. A pre-detention form completed five days earlier listed “Current barriers to removal (excluding documentation): No” and rated his removability as “High” and his risk of absconding as “Low” (para. 9).
The case note made on the day of detention is the heart of the dispute. It records that Mr Arain “States he has an outstanding appeal from 3 months ago. No info of this on CID, court of appeal tracker searched and shows has applied for permission to appeal against non allowed JR, not a barrier to removal” (para. 10). CID is the Home Office case database. In other words, the officer found nothing on the department’s own system, checked the court’s tracker, and concluded the appeal did not stop removal.
The judgment states that the Home Office had in fact been told of the appeal in June 2016 and had recorded it (para. 8). Under cross-examination, the Home Office’s witness, Liam Lynch, was asked whether the note showed the detaining officers were not aware of the pending appeal until Mr Arain pointed it out. He answered: “That appears to be what it suggests.” Asked whether the officers were unaware of the appeal and of the entry on the database, he answered: “Yes” (para. 35).
The review notes that followed show the issue moving around the department. Mr Arain’s solicitors sent information about the appeal on 23 and 29 November 2016. A review on 28 November recorded “no barriers to removal” (para. 12). By 5 December the reviewing officer wrote that he would “await advice from the GLD about whether the appeal was a barrier to removal”, referring to the Government Legal Department (para. 13). On 19 December the handwritten instruction was to “maintain detention and effect removal” (para. 14).
On 22 December 2016 Lord Justice Beatson granted an injunction in the Court of Appeal. According to the judgment, he “referred to other cases involving fraudulent English Language Tests and an announcement by the Defendant that a review was taking place which was ending in late January 2017” (para. 15). The Home Office took 15 days to decide to release Mr Arain and a further three days to carry it out (para. 16).
Mr Lynch was not one of the decision-makers. The trial judge described the department’s practice of calling an experienced witness who did not make the decisions or handle the file as “vehicular evidence” (para. 18). He nonetheless found Mr Lynch’s evidence “both conscientious and reliable” and “was not impressed at all” by the evidence of Mr Arain and his wife (para. 18).
Why the appeal failed
The law on the central point was against Mr Arain. Under the Court of Appeal’s 2004 decision in R (Pharis) v Secretary of State for the Home Department, an appeal against a refusal of permission for judicial review does not automatically stop removal; a person who wants a stay must apply for one (para. 25). The judgment records that Mr Arain never applied to the Court of Appeal for a stay of the removal decision dated 15 December 2016, and that he made and then withdrew a bail application before seeking the injunction “at the last minute” (para. 20).
On the facts, the trial judge found that the Home Office had considered the appeal, Mr Arain’s wife and children, and alternatives to detention, and that detention until 23 December 2016 was reasonable (paras. 25 to 28). He also found that the roughly two-week delay in releasing Mr Arain after the injunction, over Christmas and New Year, was reasonable while the department checked whether the appeal would be expedited (para. 27 and para. 40). Ritchie J held there was sufficient evidence for each finding “despite the concessions made in evidence by Mr Lynch, who was not the decision maker on the original detention or the reviews” (para. 36).
The larger point concerns pleading. In detention claims the burden of proving that detention was lawful lies on the Home Office. Mr Arain’s lawyers argued, in effect, that this meant they did not need to identify each way the department had acted unlawfully. The trial judge disagreed. He warned that otherwise “one would simply end up in a position where a claimant could say and issue proceedings on the basis of an allegation of (a) I was detained, and (b) you justify it” (para. 17, quoting the trial judgment at para. 81).
Ritchie J agreed. He wrote that “This Appellant did not ever particularise any assertion of breach of any Regulations, Rules, Policy or Guidance” and set out the rule in two sentences: “The responsibility of pleading the claim rests on the Claimant. Once the case is sufficiently pleaded, the burden of proof of the lawfulness of the imprisonment rests on the Defendant” (para. 33). He described the first ground of appeal as “totally without merit” (para. 41).
The judgment is also critical of how the claim was run. A new allegation, that the Home Office failed to seek advice from an internal unit under its judicial review guidance, “first emerged in the Claimant’s skeleton argument the day before trial”, and no application was made to amend the claim (para. 45). At the appeal hearing, Mr Arain’s side applied orally to admit new material without notice; the reason given “was that the lawyer representing the Appellant had not thought to do so until recently” (para. 6). Ritchie J refused it. He concluded that the trial judge “dealt fairly and tolerantly with the case, as pleaded, despite the Claimant’s breaches of the pre-trial directions” (para. 51).
The wider English-test scandal
The judgment does not name the testing company involved in Mr Arain’s case, so RSN cannot say which test he took. The timing, however, overlaps with the English-test fraud scandal that broke in 2014. In February 2014 the BBC’s Panorama programme exposed organised fraud in English language tests used for UK visas. The provider implicated was the US-based Educational Testing Service (ETS), which ran the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). The National Audit Office (NAO) investigation published in May 2019 found that ETS “identified virtually every test in the UK as suspicious” and classed 58% of 58,361 UK test participants as having invalid results and 39% as questionable.
The NAO’s figures cut both ways. On one side, they describe organised fraud on a large scale: 75 colleges and one university lost their sponsor licences in 2014, and 25 organised criminals had been convicted by the time of the report. The department estimated it had spent £21 million dealing with the fallout by November 2017. On the other side, the NAO reported that people flagged with invalid results had “won 2,664 First-tier appeals against immigration decisions since 2014, equivalent to 8% of all those with invalid test results.” An expert commissioned by the National Union of Students said voice-recognition software “could have made errors in up to 20% of cases”; the Home Office’s own expert estimated “substantially fewer than 1%” were wrongly identified.
That dispute is real, but it does not reach Mr Arain’s case. His fraud finding came from a 2015 judgment that was never appealed, and his challenge to the refusal of leave was, according to the judgment, “marked totally without merit by Davis LJ in May 2022” (para. 19). Readers following Home Office litigation will recall RSN’s report this week on Gopalakrishnan v Home Office, in which the High Court found a £7 million detention claim fundamentally dishonest. The two cases are different in kind, but both show courts testing detention claims closely against the documents.
Counter-arguments
The strongest case for Mr Arain is the one his counsel made. The officers who detained him did not know about an appeal that the department had recorded months before, and the Home Office’s own witness accepted as much. A detention decision made on incomplete information is, on this view, a bad decision even if a better-informed officer would have reached the same result. His counsel also argued that Mr Lynch accepted the officers might not have detained him had they known of the appeal (para. 48). That was the appellant’s submission; the judge did not adopt it as a finding.
Critics of the system would add three points, which are RSN’s summary of common arguments rather than claims made in this judgment. First, “vehicular evidence” means the people who made the decisions are not cross-examined. Second, a strict pleading rule asks claimants to name specific policy breaches in a field the judge himself described as having “a plethora of Regulations, Rules, Guidance and Policies” (para. 33). Third, a husband and father of two young children spent Christmas 2016 in detention, after the Court of Appeal had blocked his removal, while the department considered whether the appeal would be expedited.
Against that, the judgment shows the officer did check, did find the appeal on the court tracker, and applied the law correctly. The Court of Appeal held in 2004 that a pending permission appeal is not, by itself, a bar to removal. Mr Arain had no right to remain in the UK from at least September 2015, had been found to have committed fraud, and did not seek a stay until removal was imminent. The Home Office released him within about two and a half weeks of the injunction. The trial judge found that period reasonable and the appeal judge upheld the finding.
What is established, disputed and not established
Established (by the judgment):
- The High Court dismissed all five grounds of Mr Arain’s appeal on 6 November 2026 (para. 51).
- Mr Arain was detained on 21 November 2016 and released in early January 2017; the pleaded claim covered 50 days to 9 January 2017 (para. 8).
- His first leave application was refused because of fraud in his English language test, and adverse fraud findings by HHJ Kelly in 2015 were not appealed (paras. 8 and 19).
- The Home Office recorded the Court of Appeal appeal in June 2016, yet the detaining officer wrote “No info of this on CID” on 21 November 2016 (paras. 8 and 10).
- The courts found the Home Office considered the appeal, the family and alternatives to detention, and that the delay after the injunction was reasonable (paras. 25 to 28 and 36 to 40).
Disputed:
- Whether the detaining officers’ lack of awareness of the database entry made the decision to detain unlawful. Mr Arain said it did; both courts held that the documents showed the appeal was considered.
- Whether claimants should have to identify specific policy breaches when the Home Office bears the burden of proving detention was lawful.
- Whether the ETS test results used across the wider TOEIC scandal were reliable. Expert estimates of error ranged from substantially under 1% to up to 20%, according to the NAO.
Not established:
- Which English test or testing company was involved in Mr Arain’s case. The judgment does not say.
- Mr Arain’s current immigration status, or whether he has been removed. The judgment does not say.
- What the litigation has cost the taxpayer. No costs figure appears in the judgment.
- Whether Mr Arain will seek to appeal further.
Analysis: the system worked, slowly
RSN’s assessment is that the judgment is a sound one and a useful precedent. Courts should not allow a detention claim to proceed on the bare assertion that the state must justify itself, while the claimant keeps the real allegations back until the day before trial. Ritchie J’s statement of the rule is clear enough to be quoted in future cases, and it protects public money spent defending vaguely pleaded claims.
The same judgment also records a department whose own database did not show what it had been told five months earlier. That is a records problem, not a legal one, and it is a familiar pattern. In 2016 RSN reported on a US Department of Homeland Security inspector general finding that at least 858 people who had been ordered deported under another name were granted American citizenship, because old fingerprint records were missing from digital repositories. In Britain, RSN reported in July that the Public Accounts Committee had warned of institutional failure in the asylum system. Accurate records are what make firm enforcement defensible in court.
Time is the other lesson. The detention took place in late 2016. The Court of Appeal permission appeal, notified to the Home Office in June 2016, was not disposed of until May 2022. The damages claim form was dated November 2022 and issued in February 2023. Trial came in 2025 and the appeal in late 2026. The judgment itself observes that the events occurred “nearly 10 years ago” (para. 8).
Polling reported by RSN in 2016 found that American voters wanted immigration laws enforced, and there is little reason to think British voters see it differently. That last point is RSN’s view, not a polling finding. Enforcement that takes a decade to settle in court is hard to call enforcement at all. RSN’s recent coverage of AAM v Home Office in the Court of Appeal is another example of immigration questions being settled by appellate judges years after the events.
What accountability would look like
- The Home Office should explain why a Court of Appeal appeal recorded in June 2016 did not appear to the officer searching its case database in November 2016, and whether that gap has since been closed.
- The department should publish what it has spent defending this claim through trial and appeal, and whether it will seek its costs from Mr Arain.
- The Home Office should state whether Mr Arain remains in the UK and, if so, on what basis, given the fraud finding and the 2022 dismissal of his appeal.
- Ministers should report how many people flagged in the 2014 English-test investigations remain in the UK without leave, updating the NAO’s March 2019 figures.
- The courts and the Ministry of Justice should look at why a permission appeal in an immigration judicial review took about six years to be decided.
Sources: Arain v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 2853 (KB), National Archives Find Case Law; National Audit Office, Investigation into the response to cheating in English language tests, summary (May 2019); NAO press release, May 2019.
Image: Home Office, Becket House, London. Photo by Robin Webster / geograph.org.uk, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
How this article was made: Right Side News researched and drafted this article with the help of AI tools. Sources are linked so readers can check them. Spot an error? Tell us in the comments and we will correct it.
