Home secretary accused of hardening settlement rules for 200,000 successful asylum applicants

The Refugee Council said the hardening of plans came despite Mahmood's personal reassurances last year that only “illegal entrants who are not refugees will face a 30-year wait for settlement”. In a further tightening of the rules, a cohort of 200,000 successful asylum applicants who were told they could apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years will now face reviews of their status every 30 months.

Mahmood announced a series of immigration proposals on Monday, some of which softened the rules for care workers and their families after unions, cabinet members and backbench Labour MPs voiced their concerns. Refugees who arrive by irregular means, for example, by small boat, will face a 30-year wait for settlement under the new plans.

In March, the government reassured hundreds of thousands of asylum claimants that they would be able to apply for settlement after five years, as long as their application had already been submitted. An explanatory memo at the time said: “Adults and accompanied and unaccompanied children granted five years’ leave as a result of an asylum claim or further submissions made by 1 March 2026 will remain eligible to apply for settlement after five years.” That guarantee has been quietly dropped in the small print of the government's latest immigration plan released on Monday. According to footnote 14 in the Home Office document A fairer pathway to settlement: “Those refugees, not on safe and legal routes, who claimed asylum before 2 March 2026 will move to core protection.” Under the core protection scheme, adults and their children receive an initial period of only 30 months of permission to stay, which must then be renewed.

Jon Featonby, the chief policy analyst at the Refugee Council, said: “Keeping changing positions on what refugees should expect will cause distress and huge uncertainty. Thousands of refugees who thought they were just weeks or months away from being able to access settlement could now have to wait for another 25 years. It is impossible to expect people to start new lives while living with a temporary status that expires every 30 months for 30 years. That’s decades of fear and uncertainty for people who have already faced war, conflict and persecution and simply want to be safe here. These plans will also cause chaos for the Home Office, which will now have decades of repeated extra applications to process at enormous cost to the public purse.”

Responding to the Refugee Council's analysis, the Home Office said there had been no policy change since last year's proposals but declined to comment further on Mahmood's comments on X or the footnote in the Home Office's recent document. She told MPs on Monday: “The right to live in the UK for ever will no longer be granted to migrants almost automatically after five years. Instead, it will be earned, under the new earned settlement model set out before parliament today.”