The new asylum laws represent a fundamental downgrading of the rights of vulnerable people

How do you build a life when your right to remain is reassessed every two and a half years?

Shabana Mahmood announced asylum system reform this week Pic: UK Parliament/Flickr

Welcome to Labour’s Britain, where it takes twenty years to belong. If you were expecting more from a centre-left government, you’re not alone.

The government is calling this the biggest shake-up of asylum laws in “modern times,” a supposedly controlled, competent reset modelled on Denmark’s experiment in deterrence.

Ministers insist it will “restore trust” and “take the heat out of” Britain’s toxic migration debate. But just below the surface is a picture of a government trying to build a system out of suspicion, insecurity and the quiet hope that if you make life miserable enough, people will simply stop coming.

At the core of Labour’s plan is a radical shift: refugee status becomes temporary. Instead of the current five-year route to settlement, people will need to live in the UK for twenty years before they can call this country home. Their protection will be reviewed every 30 months, meaning they can be removed the moment a Home Office caseworker deems their country “safe.”

It is hard to overstate what that means in real terms. How do you raise children when your right to remain is reassessed every two and a half years? How do you plan a future, build friendships, or invest in a community when your life is structured around the threat of sudden removal?

Mahmood claims these measures will calm public anxiety. In reality, they will do the opposite – a neighbour who is never allowed to belong will never be seen as belonging. Labour is creating an underclass: people barred from the legal benefits of citizenship, kept at the margins, constantly at risk of removal. How is that supposed to encourage integration? How does it make those who remain feel British, invested, or willing to contribute to society?

The legal architecture of asylum is also being aggressively rewritten. The appeals system will become a single consolidated appeal overseen by “trained adjudicators.” Human rights protections will be narrowed so that only parents and minor children count as family. The prohibition on inhuman or degrading treatment will be reinterpreted to ease deportations, and tightening the Modern Slavery Act in the way proposed risks silencing genuine trafficking survivors who cannot safely disclose their stories straight away. These aren’t just tweaks, but a fundamental downgrading of the rights of vulnerable people.

Then there’s the question of support. The legal duty to house and financially assist asylum seekers will be scrapped and help will only be offered to those deemed “destitute”, and can be withheld if the government decides someone has “deliberately” made themselves destitute. People with assets will be expected to pay for their accommodation, and ministers are now openly discussing seizing items like cars, e-bikes and even jewellery to recover costs. It is hard not to wince at the historical connotations; the darker traditions of the last century, when states asserted control over persecuted minorities by taking the last remnants of their property.

It is difficult to read this as anything other than making the already painful asylum process so bleak that people will think twice about ever seeking Britain’s protection.

To balance all this, Labour points to its new “safe and legal routes,” capped annually and inspired by the Homes for Ukraine scheme. These routes, in principle, are welcome. But for every sponsored refugee, many more will find themselves trapped in the harsher temporary-status regime for decades. The annual cap itself underscores the political logic: safety is a controlled commodity rather than a global necessity. None of this engages with the scale of displacement we face in an age of conflict and climate chaos, nor Britain’s moral responsibilities within that global picture.

And then comes the killer question: will any of this even work? Proponents claim temporary status acts as a deterrent, but the UK’s pull factors look different from Denmark’s. There is scant evidence that decades of precarity will stop people crossing the Channel. Politically, Denmark’s centre-left didn’t “solve” the migration debate with its reforms; it simply normalised them, shifting the whole spectrum rightwards. Labour risks importing that stalemate: a system that integrates almost no one and leaves everyone angrier than before.

This package paints asylum seekers as schemers, not survivors, and turns a legal right into a privilege that the state can withhold at will. Nothing about it fits Labour’s claim to be a party of compassion, let alone its tradition of siding with the powerless.

Ultimately, this isn’t just policy, but political theatre. It’s a statement about who belongs in Britain, and who never will. The government may call this reform, but in practice it is a blueprint for exclusion – and a betrayal of its own conscience.■

About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster. Zoë then worked as a policy and politics reporter at the New Statesman, before joining the Independent as a political correspondent. When not writing about politics and policy, she is a regular commentator on TV and radio and a panellist on the Oh God What Now podcast.

If you’ve enjoyed reading Zoë’s latest story then consider subscribing to The Lead or sharing this so others can read it to.