Britain’s Labour government has unveiled what it calls the “most sweeping asylum reforms in modern times”. They include limiting the right of refugees to stay in Britain permanently and a crackdown on migrants working illegally with delivery apps such as Deliveroo.
The measures also include reviewing individual claims every 2½ years and sending applicants back to their home countries, such as Syria, if they are deemed safe. The UK will also make it harder for failed asylum seekers to use family provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights to stop their deportation.
Officials will also be able to force refugees and asylum seekers with assets such as cars to sell them to help pay for accommodation and support.
Refugees will also have to wait 20 years for permanent status, while the scope for appeals will be tightened with the setting up of a new appeals body.
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The home office’s Restoring Order and Control document, which lays out the plans, also includes a promise to end the UK government’s legal obligation to support destitute asylum seekers.
“We will restore a discretionary power to offer support . . . We will also deny support to those who have deliberately made themselves destitute,” says the document.
It also proposes ending the automatic right of asylum seekers to bring over family, as well as more relaxed rules on residency applications for refugees who switch out of the “core” international protection system to work and study visa programmes instead.
Shabana Mahmood, the UK’s home secretary, said Britain had become the favourite destination in Europe for those seeking to “asylum shop”. Asylum claims rose in Britain by 18 per cent last year, she said, while elsewhere in Europe they fell 13 per cent.
While some Labour rebels have criticised some of the changes as “repugnant”, advisers to the government are understood to see the reforms as crucial for the political survival of the administration. Labour currently lags Nigel Farage’s anti-migrant Reform UK in polls.
Ms Mahmood, meanwhile, pitched the aim of cutting the number of refugees and asylum seekers as more of a “moral mission”.
She said the existing asylum system was designed for a “simpler era” and she would cut through a “thicket of laws” to update it.
“Where asylum seekers have failed in their claims, many frustrate our attempts to remove them,” she said. “We have shown ourselves unwilling to show the necessary toughness . . . to assert our right to return those with no right to be here.”
In future, she promised British voters, “when an asylum seeker has failed in their claim, we will take a more hard-headed approach to removing them”.
UK prime minister Keir Starmer said it was “devastatingly simple” that the numbers arriving on small boats would not fall unless there was a “stronger deterrent”. The Labour government said it is exploring its own third-country returns scheme after it abolished the previous Tory government’s Rwanda scheme.
The reforms formally launched by Ms Mahmood late on Monday are themed around three key areas. The first is cutting the number of asylum-seeker arrivals. Secondly, making it easier to deport those whose claims have failed and, thirdly, promoting legal asylum routes to Britain with a cap on the numbers.
As well as measures such as shortening the leave to remain, Britain will also cut access to taxpayer funds and expand right-to-work checks. Apps such as Deliveroo have also agreed to sign data-sharing agreements to detect asylum seekers who are working.
Ms Mahmood laid out her plans in the House of Commons on Monday evening, where the opposition Tory leader Kemi Badenoch praised her “fresh energy” but said the proposed reforms were “not enough”.
The question now for Ms Mahmood is whether Labour backbenchers will rebel in big numbers.
