Safe and legal humanitarian routes to the UK

‘Safe and legal routes’ are authorised immigration arrangements which enable a person to move to another country for humanitarian reasons. They include refugee resettlement schemes, complementary pathways, and humanitarian visas.

The UK has a long history of providing safe routes in the form of refugee family reunion visas and refugee resettlement schemes. In the past five years it has also created humanitarian pathways for Ukrainians, Hong Kongers, and Afghans, and established some other small-scale pilot arrangements.

Some advocates argue (PDF) that the proliferation of safe and legal routes to the UK has resulted in a confusing and uncoordinated framework of provision. The schemes offer different lengths of immigration permission and varying levels of integration support, and only some groups of arrivals are formally recognised as eligible for refugee status and the associated protections required under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Safe and legal routes to the UK

The Ukraine and Hong Kong British National (Overseas) (BN(O)) schemes are the most used routes currently available. They are uncapped, application-based schemes which give broadly unrestricted rights to live, work and study in the UK. Applications under the Ukraine schemes are free of charge but there are fees for Hong Kong BN(O) visas.

The Ukraine schemes only give temporary permission to stay in the UK. The government intends to confirm long-term plans for Ukrainians in the UK later this year.

Hong Kong BN(O) visa holders can apply to stay in the UK permanently after five years. There is some uncertainty about how their eligibility for permanent permission to stay will be affected by the government’s future plans for earned settlement.

The UK’s global refugee resettlement schemes (UK Resettlement Scheme, Community Sponsorship and the Mandate Scheme) cater for vulnerable refugees who are referred by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). They have been operating at very limited capacity in recent years.

The UK/European Applicant Transfer Scheme, launched in August 2025, is an application-based route which is available to a limited number of unauthorised migrants in France. It is part of the “one-in, one-out” deal with France and some refugee rights advocates don’t consider it to be a safe and legal route (PDF). It is operating as a pilot scheme until June 2026; as of early March 2026, 380 people had come to the UK.

The three Afghan schemes closed to new applications in July 2024 but are still processing some cases. Around 38,000 Afghans had arrived through those routes by the end of 2025 and, as of February 2026, around 9,000 people were still waiting to be relocated in the UK (mostly through the ARAP scheme). The government aims for all Afghans to have arrived in the UK by March 2029.

Recent application trends

Since 2020, almost 575,000 people have come to the UK through a safe and legal route. Most people (around 283,000) have been granted permission under the Ukraine schemes, followed by the special visa scheme for Hong Kongers (around 186,000 people), the refugee family reunion route (around 62,000 people) and the Afghan schemes (around 38,000 people).

The number of people coming to the UK through safe and legal routes has fallen each year since 2022. This has been largely driven by declining numbers of arrivals under the Ukraine and Hong Kong routes.

In 2025, around 50,000 people were granted permission to come to the UK through a safe and legal route; 23% fewer than in 2024. In addition, almost 141,000 Ukrainians and Hong Kongers already in the UK were granted visa extensions (mostly Ukrainians).

The number of people arriving through the refugee family reunion route increased between 2023 and 2025. The increase broadly reflected the pattern of asylum decision-making and outcome of efforts to clear the asylum backlog. The government suspended the refugee family reunion route in September 2025. It is unclear when it will reopen but the government has said it wants to introduce more restrictive eligibility criteria.

Calls for more safe and legal routes

Expanding safe and legal routes is often suggested as a policy response to small boat crossings and other forms of unauthorised migration. Commentators have noted, for example, that very few Ukrainians have been detected trying to enter the UK without authorisation since the launch of special visa schemes for Ukrainians.

Academic evidence of the relationship between the availability of legal migration pathways and the scale of unauthorised migration is limited.

Designing humanitarian schemes usually involves trade-offs in terms of their reach, scale and accessibility. Some experts have cast doubt on whether increasing legal routes would significantly reduce demand for people smugglers and levels of unauthorised migration. They argue that some people will always need to make unauthorised journeys to seek asylum.

The government’s plans for safe routes

The government is currently reviewing refugee resettlement routes. It wants to

• make greater use of a community sponsorship model, which gives groups in the UK more responsibility for supporting new arrivals;
• introduce new study and work-based routes for refugees overseas; and
• set a limit on the number of people who can come to the UK through resettlement routes.

These are similar to ideas proposed by the Johnson and Sunak governments.

The Sunak government legislated for powers to introduce a cap on new arrivals in 2023 but had made limited progress towards implementing it by the time of the 2024 general election.

Like other recent administrations, the government’s support for support for safe and legal routes is part of its plans to make broader changes to asylum and removal policies, which it hopes will reduce unfounded asylum claims and unauthorised journeys to the UK.