Shabana Mahmood has been accused of causing “distress and uncertainty” to hundreds of thousands of refugees by quietly introducing plans to force them to wait up to 30 years before being granted the right to settle in the UK. The Refugee Council said the home secretary’s hardening of plans came despite her 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, by small boat for example, will face a 30-year wait for settlement in the UK under the new plans. Last year’s consultation included a proposal that people who arrived irregularly would face a 10-year penalty for having done so.
However, this was not expected to apply to those who had been granted refugee status. Mahmood wrote last year that refugees would be spared the 10-year penalty. In a post on the social media platform X on 21 November 2025, she shared an image of the white cliffs of Dover, with the words: “Illegal entrants who are not refugees will face a 30-year wait for settlement.” The House of Commons library pointed to Mahmood’s post as evidence that only “non-refugees who secured their visa after illegal entry or overstaying would take up to 30 years”.
In March, the government reassured hundreds of thousands of asylum claimants that they would be able to apply for settlement in the UK 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 5 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 5 years.” That guarantee has been quietly dropped in the small print of the government’s latest immigration plan which was 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 Home Office’s core protection scheme, adults and their children receive an initial period of only 30 months of permission to stay which must then be renewed.
If conditions in their home country are considered safe, their refugee status can be revoked. 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.
That’s decades of fear and uncertainty for people who have already faced war, conflict and persecution and simply want to be safe here. 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.”
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