Private Life Update

All the new rules discussed below apply to applications made on or after 20 June 2022.

Private life

The new Appendix Private Life retains the four grounds on which permission can be granted based on private life. These are  are:

• be a child resident in the UK for at least seven years who can’t reasonably be expected to leave (‘seven-year children’), which will now be paragraph PL 3.1

• be aged 18 to 24 and resident here for at least half their life (‘young adults’), now PL 4.1

• be resident here for more than 20 years, PL 5.1(a)

• face very significant obstacles to integration in their country of return, PL 5.1(b)

Until now, successful applicants on private life grounds have been granted 30 months’ permission to stay, following which they must reapply if they wish to extend their stay. Appendix Private Life now allows young adults and seven-year children to choose whether to apply for 30 months’ or 60 months’ permission. The fee maybe the difference between the two.

The most significant change is  the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain. Previously, applicants had to complete ten years on the private life route before they could get ILR. Appendix Private Life changes that.

A child who was born in the UK can apply for ILR immediately after spending the first seven years of their life here – even if they have never had any leave to remain. Great news , as it avoids the need for children in this position repeatedly to reapply for extensions. However, they must still show that it would not be reasonable to expect them to leave the UK. 

For seven-year children who weren’t born in the UK, there is a new accelerated route enabling them to get ILR after five years’ leave instead of ten. The same applies to young adults, replicating a policy  last year as a concession outside the Rules.

Everyone else on the private life route still needs to complete ten years after being granted permission before they can get ILR. But in a change from the previous position, those ten years need not all have been spent on the private life route: permission granted under Appendix FM, the ten-year family route or Article 8 outside the Rules can now count towards the qualifying period. 

There are also new and seemingly generous provisions in the new Appendix Private Life there are some  new, stricter, suitability requirements.

A prison sentence of at least 12 months now prevents a person from ever getting ILR on the private life route (previously they could do so if 15 years had passed since the end of the sentence). People in this position are presumably expected to make do with endless extensions.

A prison sentence of less than 12 months prevents a grant of ILR for the first five years after the sentence is completed. It also disqualifies a child or young adult from obtaining ILR on the accelerated five-year route. The same applies where the applicant has been involved in a sham marriage or civil partnership, practised deception or breached conditions, or where they have an outstanding litigation or NHS debt.