Yesterday, the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood set out a package of immigration and asylum reforms: as she described them, “the most significant reforms to migration in a generation”. These are very small steps (some of which most sensible members of the public would have assumed to already be the case), but Ms Mahmood is at least moving in the right direction.
The centrepiece announcement is the extension of the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain from five to ten years. Ms Mahmood concedes settlement should be earned, not automatic, and the introduction of conditions (a clean criminal record, no debt to the taxpayer, a history of work and tax contributions, and English to A-level standard) is long overdue. Crucially, these new rules will apply retrospectively to the hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers and dependants who arrived during the so-called “Boriswave” of 2022–24.
The Home Office estimates this cohort has a lifetime cost to the taxpayer of £10 billion; this is an oddly low figure given how many of the Boriswave are low wage workers or dependents. The Centre for Migration Control has estimated the cohort lifetime cost as being £35 billion, and the Centre for Policy Studies estimated the cohort lifetime cost as possibly being as high as £234 billion.
On asylum, the reduction in initial refugee leave from five years to two and a half years, with a review at that point, is a welcome alignment with peer countries like Denmark. The principle that refugee status is temporary protection, not a fast-track to permanent settlement, is entirely consistent with the 1951 Convention. Likewise, the move to replace the duty to provide asylum support with a discretionary power – conditional on claimants following the law and not working illegally – is a step in the right direction.
The suspension of certain visa routes for Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan, alongside the imposition of visit visas on Nicaragua and St Lucia, sounds firm on paper. In practice, the numbers from these countries are small. Student visas from the four suspended nations amounted to around 2,500 in 2025; India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh account for roughly 160,000, and almost 5000 Pakistani students claimed asylum last year alone. If the government is serious about tackling abuse of the study route, it must look at where the real volumes are.
Far less convincing is the proposal to offer failed asylum-seeking families up to £40,000 in incentive payments to leave voluntarily. The claim that it will deliver long-term savings is unconvincing, especially when the Home Office admits it has no idea of the numbers involved – a shocking admission in itself. All this risks doing is encouraging more illegal arrivals, safe in the knowledge that if all efforts to stay fail, there will still be a handout and a flight home at the end of it.
Even worse, the speech offered nothing addressing the fundamental problem: the sheer scale of the inflow. Net migration has fallen by nearly 70 per cent, the Home Secretary claimed, but non-EU net migration still adds well over a million people to the population every three years: the equivalent of a city the size of Birmingham. Procedural adjustments to the settlement pathway do little to change this.
Ms Mahmood is talking the talk, and beginning to walk the walk. Her promises of control are welcome. But the test of these reforms will not be whether they look tough on paper; it will be whether they deliver a sustained fall in the numbers. On that measure, the jury remains firmly out.