This week, Shabana Mahmood will take the first steps in implementing the ‘most sweeping asylum reforms in modern times’ to address what she has described as an ‘existential threat to our country’ – a lack of control at the border, rising anger over migration and low public trust in politics.
These changes are as significant as the Home Secretary suggests. They represent a paradigm shift away from territorial asylum and the post-war settlement, when countries promised to ‘never again’ allow the events of World War II when Jewish refugees were turned back by European border and visa policies. But they are also a gamble, as the evidence is not on her side.
Drawing inspiration from Denmark, the Home Secretary will make refugee protection temporary: granting refugees just 30 months of leave at a time, while extending the route to permanent settlement to 20 years. Her stated aim here is to deter people from arriving irregularly and to return refugees to their country of origin once safe to do so. But there is no evidence that increasing the temporary nature of refugee status makes it more possible to return refugees to their home countries, while there is evidence that it has negative consequences for integration here in the UK.
Returning refugees relies on their countries of origin becoming safe and stable. Most arriving by small boat are coming from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran and Sudan – and yet at the very moment the Home Secretary is announcing these plans, further conflict has erupted in the Middle East and the civil war in Sudan rages on. Denmark has trialled this approach since 2015, but has so far been unable to return any of the 30,000 Syrians living there.
Denmark did succeed in its objective to reduce the number of asylum applications. For those seeking to follow this example, however, the evidence remains contested on what ultimately contributed to this decline. What we do know is that restricting refugees’ rights and access to benefits has been shown to have limited impact, and the three main drivers for asylum journeys remain: social networks, English language and diaspora communities. The Home Office should be cautious about concluding that implementing similar policies here would achieve similar results – even more so when you consider the very different UK and Danish contexts.
There are also real trade-offs for the government in pursuing these policies. Under the new system, the Home Office will need to process at least 1.6 million refugee reviews in the first decade, at a cost of £1.1 billion to the taxpayer. There are costs to integration too, contrary to the Danish government’s stated policy objectives, its reforms to permanent residency reduced refugee employment by 30% and had no impact on language acquisition.
The Home Secretary is right that without reform ‘the entire future of Britain’s asylum system will be in jeopardy’. The challenge for the government is very real: 2025 was the second highest year in terms of small boat arrivals, and the public continues to name immigration as a top concern. Years of mismanagement have eroded public trust, and our asylum system is now seen as chaotic and unfair.
So what is the progressive alternative? In today’s changing world, how should government deliver on asylum, if it is to simultaneously preserve fundamental rights while restoring order, safety and trust?
The Home Secretary’s answer is to shift away from asylum to discretionary safe and legal routes. Under her reforms, sanctuary will be offered to those on specific schemes, while asylum applicants will be deterred – whether they arrive irregularly or by legal visa. This week, the Home Secretary closed visa routes for people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan, claiming it was an abuse of these routes for people to seek asylum after arrival.
We need only look to America to understand the problem with replacing asylum with safe and legal routes. Trump has all but ended asylum in the US and closed UN-backed refugee resettlement, choosing instead to offer protection only to white Afrikaners via a discretionary scheme.
This was the system we had before the post-war human rights framework, when sanctuary was not a right but a privilege bestowed upon favoured groups – governments could pick and choose who they would help, and who they would not. Unlike the right to seek asylum, which is internationally agreed and based on an individual’s need for protection from persecution, safe and legal routes are down to individual governments’ discretion and can be shaped by political priorities (and prejudices). Safe and legal routes are complementary to asylum; they must not replace it.
The rights-based system set out in the 1951 Refugee Convention is as relevant and needed now as it has ever been. To deliver on these rights in today’s world, however, governments need new tools if they are to meet the challenge of large-scale displacement and movement of people.
Our answer to this challenge is to seek to reform the system so that someone fleeing persecution can safely apply for asylum in a country like the UK without having to take a dangerous and irregular journey. This would retain the universal right to seek asylum and provide governments with greater control over their borders.
In our recent The Future Governance Forum (FGF) essay, ‘The Refugee Convention 75 years on: the case for renewal’, we set out a three-part proposal for just such a system:
First, process asylum claims before arrival. Allowing people to apply for and have their asylum claims heard before they reach the UK could reduce harmful irregular journeys, while maintaining the individual right to seek asylum. We propose pre-arrival asylum processing could take place in new ‘Asylum Management Centres’.
Second, do not grant in-country asylum to those people who still arrive irregularly, unless they have good cause. In order to operate fairly and maintain public confidence, once new pre-arrival processing is in place, then the government should limit eligibility for in-country asylum to only those who have ‘good cause’ for bypassing earlier ‘upstream’ opportunities to apply. This should disincentive people from taking dangerous irregular journeys – knowing that they have an alternative, safer approach before embarking for the UK and that they risk being ineligible for asylum if they arrive by small boat.
Third, coordinate an international approach with other countries via a new ‘Implementation Protocol’. The UK cannot solve this problem alone: the cross-border nature of irregular migration flows requires a cross-border response. Leaving the Refugee Convention itself untouched, a new multilateral protocol could lead to fairer and more effective implementation of the right to seek asylum. Governments who signed the protocol would commit to providing managed access to asylum ahead of an asylum seeker’s arrival in their country and, more ambitiously, could make binding commitments to share responsibility and play their part in protecting refugees.
The global consensus on refugee protection, which has held since the end of World War II, is wavering. The populist right is poised to rip up our asylum rules – frameworks that have kept millions safe worldwide since they came into force in 1951. In this moment, progressive governments must meet this challenge head-on and act with leadership and purpose to protect fundamental rights while restoring order and trust.
