Immigration reforms

The Labour government wants to reduce net migration, including the number of people who arrive seeking asylum.

In the year ending June 2025, an estimated 898,000 people migrated into the UK and 693,000 emigrated away from it, leaving net migration of around 200,000. This was around two thirds lower than a year earlier, when net migration was estimated to be 649,000.

A record 105,000 people applied for asylum in 2024. Asylum seekers and refugees made up around 12% of immigrants to the UK in that year (14% if humanitarian visa routes are included).

The government’s proposals to reduce net migration and reform the asylum system are described in two important policy documents:

• Restoring Control over the Immigration System, May 2025, a white paper on immigration policy generally
• Restoring Order and Control, November 2025, a policy statement on asylum and removal of unauthorised migrants

In addition, the Home Office has proposed changes to the rules on qualifying for permanent residence (also known as settlement or indefinite leave to remain). These ‘earned settlement’ changes are designed to prevent recent migrants who work in jobs considered lower-skilled – adult social care, in particular – from gaining access to the welfare system after five years in the UK.

The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, made various announcements in early March 2026 on implementing specific policy ideas. These announcements mainly focused on asylum, where the idea is that the refugee status granted to successful applicants would become temporary.

1. Proposed asylum policies 1.1 Restoring order and control policy paper

On 17 November 2025, the Home Office published its Restoring order and control paper. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, made an oral statement on the government’s plans on the same day.

The Home Secretary’s foreword to the statement described the measures as “the most sweeping asylum reforms in modern times”, which are “designed to ensure our asylum system is fit for the modern world”.

The appendix to the statement lists all the planned changes. They fall under three broad objectives: reducing the number of arrivals to the UK; increasing removals of people without permission to be here; and providing safe and legal routes.

1.2 Reducing arrivals

These measures are intended to make the UK a less attractive destination country for asylum seekers, in line with the Home Office’s longstanding focus on "pull factors". They cover:

• Reducing the initial length of immigration permission given to people granted asylum from 60 months to 30 months. The intention is to review the person’s ongoing need for asylum when they apply for an extension of stay after 30 months. There would also be a default qualifying period of 20 years for permanent residence.
• Creating two different types of refugee status: the default ‘core protection’ and an alternative ‘protection work and study route’ for people who take up work or study. Those in the latter category would have enhanced rights to sponsor family members to join them in the UK, a shorter pathway to permanent residence, and no review of their ongoing need for asylum when extending their visa.
• Changing the asylum support system to provide more powers to refuse accommodation or financial support. Large scale asylum accommodation sites (including former military sites) would also be favoured over hotels, in line with the government’s commitment to stop using hotels as asylum accommodation by 2029.
• Making it harder to work illegally in the UK, including by increasing immigration enforcement activity and extending right-to-work checks.

1.3 Increasing removals

The Home Secretary’s foreword to the policy statement says the government intends to take “a far more hard-headed approach” to removing people who don’t have permission to stay in the UK. Measures outlined in the policy statement include:

• Scaling up removals of failed asylum seekers, including through the UK-France “one-in, one-out” returns pilot; enforcing removals for more nationalities, including Syrians; exploring the possibility of removing failed asylum seekers to safe third countries; and consulting on the process for removing families refused asylum, including an end to asylum support for families who don’t leave.
• Imposing visa sanctions on countries that don’t cooperate with efforts to remove their citizens, which the law already allows.
• Reforming the asylum appeals system, including a new version of the immigration tribunal (PDF); providing for a single appeal route; and new powers to fast-track appeals from late claimants who are facing removal.
• Pursuing changes to the European Convention on Human Rights and modern slavery legislation.
• Introducing other measures to address obstacles to removing people, including new approaches to assessing which asylum seekers are children, and swifter processes for considering weak cases from manifestly safe countries and deporting foreign national offenders.

1.4 Safe and legal routes

The statement reaffirms the government’s commitment to providing safe and legal humanitarian routes for people in need of protection and outlines plans for a new approach, which entails:

• Introducing an annual cap on the number of people admitted to the UK through safe and legal routes. The size of the cap will reflect local communities’ capacity to support refugees.
• Giving voluntary and community sector organisations a greater role in supporting refugees resettled in the UK, by extending the ‘refugee sponsorship’ model (currently a minor part of resettlement).
• Introducing new capped immigration routes for refugee and displaced students and skilled workers to come to study or work in the UK. The first of these is due to open for applications in autumn 2026.
• Retaining flexibility to respond to country-specific crises.

1.5 Measures now being introduced

Almost all of the measures described above are still just proposals and have not yet been implemented. But the Home Office has begun to introduce some of its asylum policies through a statement of changes to the immigration rules published on 5 March 2026.

The changes were summarised in a written ministerial statement, and include:

• Reducing immigration permission as a refugee to 30 months at a time.
• Introducing a ‘visa brake’ that bans citizens of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan from applying for certain mainstream visas to live in the UK.

Changes to the immigration rules take effect automatically, without a parliamentary vote being necessary. To reject the changes, MPs must pass a motion expressing disapproval of the new rules within 40 days. At time of writing, 12 MPs had signed a motion against the 5 March changes.

Separately, three statutory instruments have been introduced to change the rules on asylum support.

Refugee status to be granted for 30 months instead of five years

This change will come into force on 26 March 2026, applying to those who claim asylum on or after 2 March 2026. Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will be exempt from this change “while the pathway for this cohort is developed”.

The government says that when applying to extend their stay after 30 months, refugees with “a continuing need of sanctuary will have their protection renewed, while those whose countries are now deemed safe will be expected to return home”. The process for this review has not yet been added to the immigration rules but the written statement says “renewal of protection will not be equivalent to making an initial asylum claim”.

A similar policy of “safe return reviews”, applied at the point of applying for indefinite leave to remain, was announced in 2017 but does not appear to have been rigorously enforced.

The Home Secretary has argued that this change is needed because the current system means “refugee status is, in effect, permanent from day one” making it “amongst the most generous offers to refugees in any country in Western Europe”.

‘Visa brake’

Citizens of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan will no longer be eligible for student visas. In addition, citizens of Afghanistan will no longer be eligible for Skilled Worker visas.

The government says that the visa brake is necessary to stop “widespread visa abuse” following a surge of people from these countries claiming asylum once in the UK on a temporary visa.

An accompanying impact assessment gives relevant data (see table 1). For example, 440 Skilled Worker visas were issued to Afghan nationals from 2021 to late 2025, and there were 230 asylum claims by Afghan nationals on those visas in the same period.

The change will again come into force on 26 March 2026.

The Home Secretary has saif that the brake “is not intended to be permanent and will be regularly reviewed”.

Changes to asylum support

The government has also announced that it will revoke the existing legal duty to provide asylum seekers with support and accommodation. It would be replaced with a “conditional approach, so support is reserved only for those who genuinely need it and follow the law”.

Under the new system, support would be removed from asylum seekers who “illegally work, have the ability to support themselves, have the right to work or have broken the law”. Much of this could be done under existing regulations, subject to human rights law.

Three statutory instruments making relevant changes were laid before Parliament on 5 March, two of which require an affirmative vote:

• Asylum Support (Amendment) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/209
• Asylum Seekers (Reception Conditions) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 (draft)
• Immigration and Asylum (Provision of Accommodation to Failed Asylum-Seekers) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 (draft)

2. Proposed settlement policies

The Commons Library briefing on Changes to UK visa and settlement rules after the 2025 immigration white paper covers the other main areas in which changes are being made. This includes the ‘earned settlement’ proposals to make it more difficult to qualify for indefinite leave to remain, even if already living in the UK.

A public consultation on earned settlement closed in February 2026 and received over 200,000 responses.

2.1 Change to indefinite leave to remain introduced on 5 March 2026

The immigration rule changes published on 5 March contain one measure on earned settlement. For migrants who need to pass an English language test to get indefinite leave to remain, the level required on various immigration routes will be B2 from March 2027. This is an increase on the current B1 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

The Home Office says that B2 is broadly similar to A-level standard whereas B1 is GCSE standard (for learning English as a foreign language, not for studying English literature).

In terms of the rest of the ‘earned settlement’ changes, the Home Secretary said following a speech on 5 March 2026 that she aims to enact the finalised policy “later this year”. She has reportedly told the Times that it would be in the autumn. This does not necessarily mean that the revised immigration rules, once published, would come into force immediately: they could be left until 2027 to align with the B2 English change.

2.2 Home Affairs committee report

On 13 March 2026, the Home Affairs Select Committee published a report on the earned settlement proposals. It focused in particular on the implications for adult social care and the currently unclear position for children.

On social care, the report recognised that the Home Office faces an “extremely difficult choice”:

If no changes are made to eligibility for settled status, hundreds of thousands of care workers and their dependants will become eligible for settled status in the next few years—gaining access to public funds and likely drawing on the public purse. If the Government proceeds with plans for a 15-year route for care workers this will likely lead to one of two outcomes for affected workers: they will leave the sector and return to their countries of origin, increasing vacancies in the social care sector, reducing the availability of care and increasing cost pressures which the Government may need to cover, or they will remain in the UK care sector, at prolonged risk of poverty and exploitation.

The report recommended that if the government proceeds with a 15-year default qualifying period for this group, there should be “urgent action” on their pay and working conditions.

On children, the report noted that while the policy is not yet clear, “the proposed changes are likely to mean that many children spend most of their childhood with temporary status”. It recommended, among other things, that “children who arrive at a young age and grow up in the UK should be granted settled status by the age of 18 without needing to fulfil the requirements of the ‘Earned Settlement’ model, in recognition of the fact that Britain is their home”.

3. Commentary 3.1 Asylum

The think tank Migration Watch UK said that the asylum reforms are “very small steps […] but Ms Mahmood is at least moving in the right direction”:

Ms Mahmood is talking the talk, and beginning to walk the walk. Her promises of control are welcome. But the test of these reforms will not be whether they look tough on paper; it will be whether they deliver a sustained fall in the numbers. On that measure, the jury remains firmly out.

The think tank More in Common found in November 2025 that there was “widespread support for the Home Secretary’s new asylum policies”:

• 69% of people in Britain support the move to temporary asylum status, while 11% oppose it.
• 61% support removing the legal duty of the government to provide asylum support; 15% oppose this.
• 53% support a 20-year pathway to permanent residence, with 23% opposed.

The United Nations Refugee Agency has commented that while the relevant UN treaty allows refugee status to be withdrawn if circumstances have fundamentally changed, "it was not intended that refugees would be subject to constant review of their status".

Amnesty International, a human rights charity, has stated that the proposed changes are a continuation of the Conservative government’s attempt to use the asylum system as “a means of deterrence against people coming to the UK rather than as a system for delivering safety and security to refugees who do”.

The Refugee Council has argued that the government’s plan to review refugee status every 30 months is “unworkable” and could cost more than £1 billion over the first decade. Its CEO, Enver Solomon, said:

These unworkable plans risk putting a 20-year hold on the lives of refugees who cannot go back to danger and now cannot move forward and rebuild their lives because of the uncertainty over their status. The Home Office has spent years struggling to make timely and correct initial decisions so radically increasing its caseload is a recipe for chaos.

Professor Ngaire Woods, founding dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, has stated that the ban on visas for certain nationalities “risks shutting out talent, experience and leadership that will strengthen and stabilise countries around the world”.

Karl Williams, research director for the Centre for Policy Studies, has called the reforms “half-hearted” and argued that they “do not go far enough towards securing Britain’s borders”:

Although the Government is attempting to emulate the tougher Danish approach to illegal migration, its half-hearted reforms will still leave Britain a relatively more attractive destination for asylum seekers than our European neighbours.

Ultimately, we need to be in the position where any migrant tempted to enter or remain in the country illegally knows that they will not be able to stay under any circumstances if they are caught doing so. Among other things, this means a Rwanda-style offshoring policy, and all the legal and institutional reform entailed in that.

3.2 Settlement

The Migration Observatory, an immigration research project based at Oxford University, has said that the government’s plans to lengthen the route to settlement would "make the UK more restrictive than most other high income countries”.

It added that a longer route to settlement would come with a “trade-off between the financial benefits of higher immigration fees for the government, and the negative effects on the integration and wellbeing of migrants”.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has said that the government’s plans to lengthen the route to settlement is “completely out of line with most of our counterparts” and will create “a near-perpetual state of insecurity”. It also stated that the plans “could have major implications for integration”.

4. Further Commons Library reading

• E-petitions relating to indefinite leave to remain, 21 January 2026
• Potential impact of proposed asylum reforms on people with protected characteristics seeking asylum, 10 December 2025
• Asylum policy in Denmark, 10 November 2025
• The potential impact of immigration reforms on humanitarian visa routes, 21 November 2025
• E-petitions relating to support and accommodation for asylum seekers, 25 September 2025
• E-petition: Suspending legal and illegal migration, 7 March 2025