Memorandum to Home Office will follow Immigration Summit of 250 expert voices

Law firm Leigh Day hosted its inaugural Immigration Summit in London on 29 April 2025. 

Lawyers, academics, journalists, NGOs and volunteers shared their expertise and experience in break-out discussions over challenges faced by those seeking to live in the UK and potentially better ways to improve the immigration systems. 

These included: 

How do victims of the Windrush Scandal obtain redress seven years on? 

Immigration Detention: Are there viable alternatives to detaining migrants?  

Modern Slavery: Are restrictive immigration policies driving people trafficking? 

The Right to Family Life: Do immigration laws curtail the right to family life? 

A keynote address was given by award-winning Channel 4 journalist Simon Israel and Lord Alfred Dubs shared his perspective on today’s immigration landscape in light of his own experience as a child who escaped Nazi Germany thanks to the Kindertransport. 

Lawyer Toufique Hossain, whose firm joined Leigh Day’s public law team in representing clients in legal challenges against the Rwanda plan, joined Sonia Lenegan and Zoe Bantleman in conversation about lessons he learned on their progress through the courts. 

Awards were presented to Windrush champion Dawn Hill, journalist Diane Taylor and barrister Kathryn Cronin for their outstanding contributions in the field of immigration. 

The day concluded with feedback from each of the discussion panels, with encouragement to “keep up the hard work needed to educate and keep people away from racism” and practical ways to ensure that people’s voices, including children’s voices, are heard.

Immigration Summit organiser, Leigh Day head of Windrush, Immigration and Asylum Team, Jacqueline McKenzie will now set to work on preparing a memorandum summarising the findings of the day’s learnings with the Home Office.

Jacqueline McKenzie said: 

“This was Leigh Day’s inaugural Immigration Summit, which we hope will become an important gathering of lawyers, academics, policy makers, politicians, diplomats, media, students, NGOs, and campaigners working on asylum, refugee, immigration, Windrush and general human rights matters.  The ground covered was expansive but the job now is to focus on how what we learned and how this will be used to build partnerships, think about the scope for strategic litigation and how we might inform public policy and law, and exploring ways of being better informed by those we set out to help, through our work.”

A link to the day’s programme is here.