Illegal migration is “tearing the country apart”, the home secretary has said, as she prepares to unveil major plans to overhaul asylum policy.
New measures set to be announced by Shabana Mahmood on Monday will include people granted asylum needing to wait 20 years before they can apply to settle permanently.
The plans will also see those granted asylum have their refugee status regularly reviewed, and those whose home countries are then deemed safe told to return.
Mahmood told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme that she saw tackling illegal migration as a “moral mission”.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the Conservatives would deport illegal migrants “within a week”, while Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey called for asylum seekers to have the right to work.
The changes are aimed at making the UK a less attractive destination for illegal migrants, leading to reduced small boat crossings and asylum claims.
Mahmood is also to announce the UK will stop granting visas to people from Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo if their governments do not rapidly improve co-operation on removals.
A Home Office source said the countries were being targeted “for their unacceptably low co-operation and obstructive returns processes”.
As first reported in the Times, the threat of the visa ban for certain countries comes after thousands of illegal migrants and criminals from the three nations were said to be in the UK.
Many specific details and practicalities of the sweeping changes to asylum policy are yet to be made clear, and will be set out by Mahmood on Monday.
The home secretary added that her plans also aimed to address “unfair” conditions that she said gave some asylum seekers better provisions than UK citizens.
She said: “I know illegal migration is causing huge divides here in our own country, and I do believe we need to act if we are to retain public consent for having an asylum system at all.”
Currently, refugee status lasts for five years, after which people can apply for indefinite leave to remain or settled status. Mahmood wants to lengthen this to 20 years.
The new measures will see refugee statuses reviewed every two-and-a-half years.
Mahmood told the BBC that asylum seekers who use “safe and legal routes”, find work and contribute to society may be able to apply to settle permanently earlier, though did not give specific details.
The policy has been inspired by Denmark, where a government led by the centre-left Social Democrats has presided over one of the toughest asylum and immigration systems in Europe.
In Denmark, refugees are given temporary residence permits, typically of two years, and in effect have to re-apply for asylum when they expire.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said the country’s policies were also about “sending a message to the human smugglers that you shouldn’t prefer Denmark”.
“What is important is this balance to avoid illegal migration but then at the same time welcome legal migration when it’s needed,” he told BBC Radio 4’s the World This Weekend.
However, Mahmood’s hardline approach has already faced opposition from some Labour MPs, including Clive Lewis, who told the BBC the Danish system echoed “talking points of the far right” and warned left-wing Labour voters may turn to the Green Party in response.
Mahmood rejected this, saying: “I am the child of migrants myself, my parents came to this country lawfully in the late 60s, and in the 70s. Immigration is absolutely woven into my experience as a Brit and also that of thousands of my constituents.
“This is a moral mission for me, because I can see illegal migration is tearing our country apart, it is dividing communities.
“People can see huge pressure in their communities and they can also see a system that is broken, and where people are able to flout the rules, abuse the system and get away with it.”
Mahmood also plans to make housing and weekly financial allowances “discretionary” and remove them from those who have a right to work in the UK but do not.
The home secretary was asked why she wanted to revoke asylum seeker support, despite the UK being “less generous” than France, Germany and Denmark when it came to support.
She said criminal gangs were selling packages to UK to asylum seekers, telling them they will receive free hotels and food, and that “we know we need to deal with those pull factors”.
The current system had “no expectation” that the 10% of asylum seekers have the right to work will actually support themselves, she says, and there is also no expectation that “if you break the law of this country you lose your accommodation”.
“That actually places those individuals in a better position than most British citizens in social housing in this country,” she said, adding: “I think that is a basic principle of fairness.”
Philp dismissed Mahmood’s plans to reform asylum policy as “gimmicks,” telling Laura Kuenssberg they were merely “tinkering with the edges” of the problem.
“I don’t object to it in principle, but it’s not going to work,” he told the BBC, adding that the Conservatives would withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
“I would go even further and say if someone gets here illegally they won’t be able to claim asylum at all and should be deported within a week.”
The home secretary is expected to say on Monday what the government wants to do in terms of changes to legislation and how the right to family life under Article 8 of the ECHR is applied in immigration cases.
Davey said his party had “some concerns” about the government’s proposed changes to asylum in the UK, but he would “look at the details”.
He argued asylum seekers should be given the right to work, as they then “wouldn’t need [government] support”, and this would be “better for the economy, and better for asylum seekers”.
Reform leader Nigel Farage said the home secretary “sounds like a Reform supporter”.
“It’s a shame that the Human Rights Act, ECHR and her own backbenchers mean that this will never happen,” he added.
Enver Solomon, chief executive at the Refugee Council, said rather than deter migrants, the 20-year timeframe would “leave people in limbo and in tense anxiety for many, many years”.
“We need a system that is controlled and is fair, and the way you do that is you make decisions fairly, in a timely fashion, and if someone is found to be a refugee, they go on and they contribute to our communities and they pay back,” he told BBC Breakfast on Sunday.
Agob, a Syrian refugee who has lived under Denmark’s strict asylum rules for 13 years, says the uncertainty of the system “sits in your body”.
“It means that you rebuild everything while knowing it can be taken away from you at any moment,” he told the BBC.
“You can’t really integrate when the system constantly treats you as temporary.”
Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory, said it is hard to measure the impact of individual policies on refugee numbers.
“At least initially, asylum seekers often don’t actually know what the policies are,” she told the BBC.
Even with stricter rules, there are still many reasons people might come to the UK, she said. They might speak English, have family in the country, or have already had asylum claims rejected elsewhere.
A total of 109,343 people claimed asylum in the UK in the 12 months to March this year, a 17% increase on the year before, according to government data.
Mr Solomon said concern about the increasing number of asylum claims was because people feel “the government has forgotten about their communities”.
According to the latest Home Office figures, 1,069 migrants arrived in the UK in the last seven days.
Figures show there have been 10,289 arrivals by small boats since Mahmood became home secretary on 5 September this year. The total so far for 2025 is more than 39,000.
The number of arrivals this year is higher than the whole of 2024 (36,816) and 2023 (29,437), but below the total at this point in 2022 (39,929).
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