An immigration law firm that signed up thousands of asylum seekers and generated income of £1.7m in legal aid in the last year, despite only employing five solicitors to represent them, has had its government contract terminated after concerns about its performance, the Guardian has learned.

The decision leaves many asylum seekers struggling to find new legal representatives at a time when the government is increasing the number of cases it refuses.

In the year ending June 2025 initial asylum grants fell from 58% to 48%, leaving more people having to lodge appeals, something that is difficult to do without a legal representative.

Middlesex Law Chambers’ legal aid income for immigration work dramatically increased from £43,000 in 2021 to £1.7m in 2025. The firm is listed on the Solicitors Regulation Authority website as having 15 offices around the country, many in legal aid deserts such as Peterborough, Plymouth and Crawley.

When the Guardian phoned these offices there was either no reply or a receptionist for the office block where the firm rented a space said it was no longer there.

The director of Middlesex Law Chambers, criminal defence solicitor Sheraz Chowdhry, said the firm had planned to expand into those areas but in most cases had not done so and had now terminated rental arrangements for those office spaces.

It currently has one solicitor employed at its Southall office doing private immigration work, one solicitor at an office in Canary Wharf in east London doing family work and a small team at its Uxbridge office doing criminal defence work. Legal aid contracts continue for those areas of work.

Chowdhry joined the firm at the end of last year just months before the previous lawyer in charge of immigration work, Hina Choudhery, died from complications of cancer.

He said: “Ultimately the firm, obstructed by Hina’s poor health over the last two years or so, has found it difficult to maintain its once very high standards in the immigration department.”

He added he found out about the termination of the legal aid contract for immigration work just weeks ago. “The decision was also only communicated to us via email on 20 August 2025.”

When asked to explain why the firm had expanded its caseload so dramatically and how it was possible to provide adequate legal representation for thousands of asylum seekers with just five immigration solicitors and a mix of 15 junior and more senior caseworkers, he said: “No solicitor was here during the expansion phase. It is difficult for me to explain how the firm suddenly grew so large in such a short space of time. I do not know.”

A typical caseload for a legally aided asylum solicitor or caseworker is 15–20. With the number of staff employed by the firm during its period of rapid expansion each solicitor and caseworker would have had about 164 cases.

Frances Timberlake, of Migrants Organise, which has many migrant members who complained about the service provided by the firm, said: “It is the Ministry of Justice’s duty to ensure that legal advice is available to people who need it. But decades of funding cuts and neglect to the legal aid system have left many people in our communities without any support.

“We urgently need funding for good legal advice and for the government to stop pushing migrants into hostile, expensive legal processes just as a charade for Reform,” she said.

Dr Jo Wilding, a researcher and senior lecturer in legal aid at the University of Sussex and an immigration barrister, said: ‘This was completely foreseeable when one small firm with very few accredited staff set up offices in several new areas, including six serious advice desert areas, and started taking on hundreds of cases.

“It should have been obvious that vulnerable people were being exploited but the Legal Aid Agency doesn’t seem to have identified or recognised that there was a problem. The solution to this is to stop treating legal aid for the most vulnerable people as if it was a market, and to pay that money to a reputable expert law firm or not-for-profit to do the work.”

Rami, a former client of Middlesex Law Chambers, said: “It’s good that the government has stepped in and closed this firm. But it feels too late, because a lot of people like me have already suffered because of the work of this firm. I had to do my asylum interview without any real advice beforehand, holding my evidence in my hand that I had translated on Google because the law firm had not done it. I have lost a lot of time in my life because of this. I have grey hair now when before this I did not.

“People seeking asylum face a lot of problems and a lawyer can help us to get through bad situations. But it is very difficult to find a legal aid lawyer and many people don’t speak English so cannot know which is a good law firm and which is not.”

A Legal Aid Agency spokesperson said: “Middlesex Law Chambers’ immigration legal aid contract has been terminated.

“Firms that hold legal aid contracts are subject to annual reviews. These can lead to financial sanctions or, as in this case, contract termination where standards are not met.”

Never underestimate the attraction of a good can-kick. That would appear to be the message coming out of Tirana on Thursday when Uefa announced it had not taken the epochal decision on overseas league fixtures that the world of football had anticipated. Instead, the executive committee decided it would embark on a round of consultation, one that would even take in the considerations of supporters to boot.

This is likely a sensible decision. There has been a fair amount of surprise in some quarters that the question of whether and by how much football leagues should be allowed to move from domestic to international is only now being properly debated in the corridors of power. After all, the first writ in this debate was served by the promoter Relevent against the United States Soccer Federation in 2019. Only with the prospect of La Liga staging a fixture between Barcelona and Villarreal in Miami as soon as December has the issue come into focus. But to have discussion at all will be regarded by many as better late than never. It is also a break with the current way of doing things.

Fifa’s Club World Cup, the biggest and most disruptive new development in the game for some time, is largely viewed as having come about as the result of one man’s determination to drive change (that man being Gianni Infantino). The process Fifa undertook to establish the tournament has, however, led to legal action and no small amount of rancour over a claimed lack of consultation with competition organisers. (It should be noted there has been less complaint from clubs, some of whom pocketed tens of millions of dollars for taking part.) In this instance, by contrast, Uefa appears to have opted for jaw jaw rather than war war.

The president of Uefa, Aleksander Ceferin, flagged this possible direction in an interview conducted before the Champions League draw in Monaco last month. Asked about the plan for overseas fixtures by Politico, Ceferin said: “We’re not happy but, as much as we checked legally, we don’t have much space here, if the federation agrees, and both federations agreed. But I think that for the future we’ll have to discuss this very seriously, because … fans should watch football at home … We will open this discussion also with Fifa, and with all the federations, because I don’t think it’s a good thing.”

If Uefa’s presumably well-remunerated lawyers weren’t wildly wrong in their calculations then deferral with a chance of dialogue was perhaps the best option Uefa could plump for in the short term. It may best serve its interests in the longer term too. With the contest to control the future of the world’s most popular sport continuing to heat up, it is possible to argue that Uefa is among the most vulnerable to any shift away from the current model of the men’s game. Its tournaments – the European Championship, the Nations League, even the Champions League – are likely to be the first to feel the squeeze should the international calendar take on even more matches in the medium term via changes such as a biennial Club World Cup. Faced with this position, being an organisation that is seen to be listening, and perhaps even collaborative, may well be a good idea.

In the Politico interview Ceferin drew a red line against a biennial Club World Cup, saying: “I wouldn’t agree with that, but I don’t think [Fifa] want to.” That last line goes against much of the reporting on the topic but was of a piece with a more emollient tone as Ceferin rolled back on remarks Uefa had made months before condemning Infantino’s “private political interests” after the Fifa’s president arrived late for his own Congress after touring the Gulf with Donald Trump. Ceferin told Politico the language used had been “a bit overemotional” and that relations with Fifa were “absolutely” in a better place.

Again with the conciliation, again another possible sign of where the balance of power lies. But by behaving constructively, by acting less as a rival and more as a facilitator, Uefa will find itself in tune with another player which could yet weigh in on the future of European football (and by extension the game as a whole): Brussels. The European courts are where much of the battles is being played out, with no ruling more consequential than that involving the European Super League, which questioned the ability of sports governing bodies to act as both regulator and competition organiser without the risk of “abusing” their “dominant position”. The European Commission, meanwhile, is taking more and more interest in ensuring the concept of a “European Sports Model” where open competition (ie promotion and relegation) runs alongside financial solidarity from the top to the bottom of the pyramid.

The European commissioner for intergenerational fairness, youth, culture and sport, Glenn Micallef, made the unusual decision to intervene in the debate over international fixtures last week, describing the plans as betraying supporters and putting the European Sports Model at risk. On Thursday, he spoke again, commending Uefa’s decision to pause and discuss. “This is the right and responsible way to do things; through inclusive dialogue and consultation,” he wrote on social media.

The Commission is the body that initiates Europe’s political direction and if it felt it necessary to intervene to protect the European Sports Model, it could. Such an action would likely throw the existing power structures in football up in the air and being on the right side of any such shift would be to any governing body’s advantage. If Ceferin’s remarks on the issue of international fixtures are correct, it may be we see such matches yet. But while it is unfortunate to lose some battles, sometimes they may help you in fighting a war.

A third of UK employers are using “bossware” technology to track workers’ activity with the most common methods including monitoring emails and web browsing.

Private companies are most likely to deploy in-work surveillance and one in seven employers are recording or reviewing screen activity, according to a UK-wide survey that estimates the extent of office snooping.

The findings, shared with the Guardian by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), are based on responses from hundreds of UK managers and suggest there has been a recent growth in computerised work surveillance.

In 2023, less than a fifth of people thought they were being monitored by an employer, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found. The finding that about a third of managers report their organisations are monitoring workers’ online activities on employer-owned devices is probably an underestimate, as roughly the same proportion said they don’t know what tracking their organisations do.

Many monitoring systems are aimed at preventing insider threats and safeguarding sensitive information as well as detecting productivity dips. But the trend appears to be causing unease. A large minority of managers are opposed to the practice, saying it undermines trust with staff and invades their personal privacy, the CMI found.

One manager at an insurance company, which is developing AI systems to monitor staff screen activity to track performance, said it was “unsettling”.

“Do they not trust their employees to do their jobs and are they looking to replace them with AI?” they said.

One provider of employee monitoring offers to report on workers’ “idle time”, “employee productivity tracking” and use of unapproved AI or social media as well as “real-time insights into employee behaviour, including screenshots, screen recordings, keystrokes, and app usage”.

In response to the findings, the ICO said bosses “must make their employees aware of the nature, extent and reasons for monitoring”, and said excessive monitoring “can undermine people’s privacy especially if they are working from home”. It warned it will “take action if necessary”.

Last year, the ICO stopped the outsourcing company Serco from using facial recognition technology and fingerprint scanning to monitor the attendance of staff at a chain of leisure centres.

Monitoring often amounts to checks that inappropriate content is not being accessed, the CMI said. But it warned, “there’s a longer-term impact if you are feeling this is big brother-like and you are being watched”.

“If it is being used, it is incredibly important employers are open, otherwise that’s going to cause significant problems in terms of data privacy and protection,” said Petra Wilton, CMI director of policy and external affairs.

Other recent examples of surveillance technology at work include plans by HSBC to install a large numbers of security cameras – 1,754 by one estimate – and biometric readers which use handprints as one way to access areas in its new London headquarters.

The accountancy firm PwC recently introduced a “traffic light” system using data from pass swipes and wifi connections to check staff are meeting a mandate to attend the office at least three days a week. A spokesperson for PwC said this was “accepted by the vast majority of our people”.

A former senior worker at a public transport authority, who asked not to be named, called the monitoring they faced, including of their online diary, “intrusive and downright harassment”.

“It started with surveillance and it ended with me leaving because I was so infuriated,” they said. One in six managers also told the CMI researchers they would consider looking for a new job if their organisation started monitoring employees’ online activities on work devices.

Among managers who knew their organisations carried out surveillance, 35% were monitoring emails. Overall, tracking log in and log off times and system access were the most popular form of surveillance.

The study found that 53% of managers supported monitoring of employees’ online activities on employer-owned devices, but 42% opposed it, mostly because it undermines trust but also because they believe it does not improve performance and can be misused or lead to unfair judgments or disciplinary actions.