Overview
- Refugee protection would shift from a five‑year route to time‑limited status set at about 30 months, with regular reviews and returns required once home countries are judged safe.
- People granted asylum after arriving by irregular routes would face a 20‑year wait for permanent settlement, with a separate 10‑year pathway for those using designated legal routes and limited accelerators via specific work or study schemes.
- The statutory duty to provide housing and weekly allowances would be revoked, making support discretionary and withdrawable from people who can work and refuse to or from those who break the law.
- The package borrows from Denmark’s model and includes plans to tighten how human‑rights protections are applied in immigration cases, with guidance to give greater weight to public safety under Article 8 of the ECHR.
- Charities and some Labour MPs condemn the measures as harsh and ineffective, as the Home Office cites record pressures with roughly 111,000 asylum applications in the year to June and more than 39,000 small‑boat arrivals this year.