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A child with a lawyer wins. A child without one usually does not.
Firstlight Legal represents unaccompanied minors through asylum appeals, for free, and trains solicitors to take these cases in their own firms. Last year we held 214 cases and trained 96 lawyers.
A child who arrives here alone is asked to explain, in a second language, to an official who has never met them, why they are afraid to go home. They are asked for dates. They are asked for documents that were burned, confiscated or never issued. Most of them are between fourteen and seventeen.
Legal aid for these appeals has been cut, then cut again, and the firms that still do the work are concentrated in two or three cities. A child placed in dispersal accommodation two hundred miles from the nearest immigration solicitor is, for practical purposes, unrepresented.
The tribunal does not lower its evidential bar for a sixteen-year-old. It cannot. What changes is whether anyone gathers the country evidence, orders the age assessment challenge, finds the border record, prepares the child for cross-examination, and turns up on the day.
That is the whole of our work: put a competent lawyer beside every child who is appealing, and make it ordinary for high street firms to take one of these cases a year.
214
appeals held last year, each one with a named solicitor on the file from first interview to determination.
96
solicitors trained to run an asylum appeal for a child inside their own firm, unpaid, with our supervision.
31
languages our helpline covers, because a child should not have to borrow a stranger's words to ask for help.
WHAT REPRESENTATION CHANGES
Represented appeals succeeded in 63 percent of our cases last year.
Unrepresented appeals in the same tribunals succeeded in 11 percent. That gap is the entire reason this organisation exists.
With a lawyer
63%
Without a lawyer
11%
Source: our own case files and published First-tier Tribunal outcome statistics for the same hearing centres, 2025. We count a success as asylum, humanitarian protection or leave to remain granted on appeal.
ONE CASE, TOLD WITH PERMISSION
S arrived at sixteen with a phone and a phone number. The first refusal letter said his account lacked credibility because he could not name the month he left.
His lawyer found the border record that proved it. He is now studying engineering and has asked us to keep telling this.
Names and identifying details are changed unless a client asks us to keep them. S read this page before it was published.
FOR LAWYERS
The pro bono training route
We run a two-day training four times a year. Take one case, get a supervising solicitor on speed dial, and we handle the file management. 96 lawyers did this last year and 88 of them took a second case.
You do not need immigration experience. You need two days, a practising certificate, and roughly forty hours across the following year. We provide the precedents, the country evidence library, the expert list and a supervising solicitor who has run several hundred of these.
Four trainings a year, in London, Manchester, Birmingham and online. The next one takes forty participants.
WHERE DONATIONS GO
Line by line
These are real unit costs from last year's accounts, not illustrative rounding. A monthly gift is worth more to us than the same amount once, because it lets us commit to a case before we know what it will need.
£46
Covers an interpreter for a full appeal hearing.
£180
Covers a country expert report.
£2,400
Covers a case from first interview to determination.
86p
Of every pound goes to casework, the helpline and training. The rest is audit, insurance and the two people who keep the accounts straight.
Governance, funding and our red lines
RED LINES
We take no money from the Home Office, no money from detention or removal contractors, and we publish every funder over £5,000.
GOVERNANCE
A board of nine trustees, three of whom arrived in this country as unaccompanied minors. Board minutes and the conflicts register are published twice a year.
FUNDING SOURCES
61 percent individual donors, 24 percent trusts and foundations, 15 percent law firm partnerships. No statutory funding of any kind.
SAFEGUARDING
Every caseworker and volunteer solicitor is DBS checked and trained in working with separated children. Complaints go to a trustee, not to staff.
Give monthly
£20 a month keeps an interpreter in the room for five hearings a year. Cancel any time, in one email, with no follow-up call.
Firstlight Legal is a registered charity. Gift Aid adds 25p to every pound if you pay UK tax. If you need a lawyer rather than a way to give, call 0808 157 0119.