Potential impact of proposed asylum reforms on people with protected characteristics seeking asylum

Background Proposed asylum reforms

On 17 November 2025, the Home Office published Restoring order and control, a policy statement outlining its plans to reform the UK’s asylum system. The Home Secretary made an oral statement on the government’s plans on the same day.

The Home Secretary’s foreword to the statement describes 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 flow of arrivals to the UK; increasing removals of people without permission to be here; and providing safe and legal routes.

Equality impact assessment

In November 2025, the Minister for Border Security and Asylum, Alex Norris, confirmed that “specific Equality Impact Assessments will be produced for individual policies in due course” and that these would be “kept under review to ensure that there are no unintended impacts on people with protected characteristics”. No timeline has been provided for when these equality impact assessments will be produced.

The Home Office has published some previous equality impact assessments on gov.uk.

Reducing arrivals

These measures are intended to make the UK a less attractive destination country for asylum seekers and unauthorised migrants. They cover:

• Reducing the initial length of immigration permission given to people granted asylum to 30 months, with restrictions on their eligibility to extend their permission or be joined by family members, and a longer qualifying period before becoming eligible for permission to stay permanently.
• 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.
• Making it harder to work illegally in the UK, including by increasing immigration enforcement activity and extending right-to-work checks.

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 creating a new appeals body; 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 asylum seekers’ ages, and swifter processes for considering weak cases from manifestly safe countries and deporting foreign national offenders.

Safe and legal routes

The statement reaffirms the government’s commitment to providing safe and legal 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/work in the UK.
• Retaining flexibility to respond to country-specific crises.

Protected characteristics

The Equality Act 2010 prohibits direct and indirect discrimination, harassment and victimisation on the basis of ‘protected characteristics’. There are nine protected characteristics:

• age;
• disability;
• gender reassignment;
• marriage and civil partnership;
• pregnancy and maternity;
• race;
• religion or belief;
• sex;
• sexual orientation.

The Public Sector Equality Duty under section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 places a statutory duty on public authorities, including government departments like the Home Office, to have due regard to certain equality considerations when exercising their functions, including the need to:

• eliminate discrimination, harassment, victimisation and any other conduct prohibited by the act,
• advance equality of opportunity between people who share a relevant protected characteristic and people who do not share it, and
• foster good relations between people who share a relevant protected characteristic and people who do not share it.

Schedule 18 of the Equality Act 2010 sets out exceptions to the public sector equality duty. In relation to the exercise of immigration and nationality functions, section 149(1)(b) (advance equality of opportunity between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it) does not apply to the protected characteristics of age, race or religion or belief.

Schedule 3 of the Equality Act 2010 permits discrimination in certain circumstances relating to age, nationality, ethnic or national origins, or place or duration of residence, including where such discrimination is authorised by the immigration rules.

Although the above provisions mean that discrimination in certain circumstances is lawful, public authorities, like the Home Office, are required to consider the justification for any such discrimination.

2023, the Women and Equalities Committee argued that people with protected characteristics are “particularly affected” and experience “unnecessary risks” because of the Home Office’s management of the asylum process.

The committee noted that it is “not currently possible from published official data to monitor outcomes in the asylum process for groups of people with vulnerabilities arising from Equality Act protected characteristics”. It urged the government to record such data, stating:

Monitoring and mitigating adverse effects of detention on groups of asylum seekers with vulnerabilities arising from Equality Act protected characteristics requires much improved data. The Government should collect and publish data on the protected characteristics of detained asylum seekers, including where they are detained and for how.

The government’s response, published in September 2023, highlighted that there is data on asylum outcomes by sex, age bracket and for claims based on sexual orientation. It said that other relevant characteristics, such as religion, is not captured in a way that allows for statistical publication but that might change with new systems in future.

Reactions from refugee organisations

Amnesty International, a human rights charity, has stated that the Labour government’s proposed asylum reforms 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 organisation regards this as an “extremely dangerous time for refugees” in the UK, describing the proposals as “irresponsible, immoral… impractical and costly”.

The Refugee Council has stated that the government’s plan to review refugee status every 30 months is “unworkable” and could “cost the taxpayer between £1.1-£1.27 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.

We know from our frontline services that stability is what allows people to heal, learn English, find work and become part of their communities. These proposals do not enable people to move forward and contribute to Britain, but instead create a system weighed down by repeated checks.

Barnardo’s, a children’s charity, has expressed “serious concerns” about the proposal to make refugee status temporary, stating that this will cause “extreme uncertainty and anxiety for children, undermining their ability to integrate in their local community and work towards a positive future”.

Barnardo’s has also argued that the proposed changes could result in children experiencing “the pervasive impact of poverty throughout their entire childhood” and has urged the government to treat “children seeking sanctuary” with “love, care and security”.

Andrea Vukovic, Co-Director of the charity Women for Refugee Women, has described the government’s plans as “morally and ethically bankrupt”. She argued that they will “cause huge harm to women seeking safety in the UK, impeding their ability to heal and to rebuild their lives”:

These plans – borrowed from hostile systems around the world – represent more cruelty, more uncertainty and more hostility for people seeking safety here. It tells those with refugee status in the UK – who have fled war, persecution, and violence – that their protection is temporary and that they will never be welcome here. This is a dangerous step in the wrong direction. Human rights are not conditional. When we allow them to be dismantled for some, we endanger them for all.

The charity Rainbow Migration says that the government’s plan to offer temporary refugee status “fails to reflect the realities faced by specific groups, including LGBTQI+ people” and that “living with a constant threat of being sent back to danger is horribly cruel”.

Diego Garcia Rodriguez, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham and a trustee at the LGBTIQ+ asylum charity Time To Be Out, argues that the proposed asylum plans “present particular risks that could undermine their [LGBTQ+ people’s] safety and ability to live openly”.