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Home secretary Shabana Mahmood is set to announce a significant watering down of the rights awarded to people granted refugee status in the UK, with many expected to receive temporary protection instead of the permanent right to remain.
In a video posted on X on Friday, Mahmood said the overhaul, which will change aspects of UK policy that had been largely untouched in decades, would be the “most significant” shake-up of the UK’s asylum system “in modern times”.
The measures are a response to the continued high levels of asylum claims in the UK from people arriving both on travel visas or through clandestine means such as small boats. There were a record 111,084 asylum claims in the UK in the year to June 2025, 14 per cent more than the previous year.
“We need to reduce the numbers coming here illegally,” Mahmood said in the video. “We need to remove more people who have no right to be here.”
The new approach, which the home secretary will present to parliament on Monday, is modelled on similar steps taken by Denmark in 2021, credited with sharply reducing the number of people seeking asylum in the Nordic country.
Under the changes to settlement rights, the UK will no longer offer permanent residence to those seeking asylum and who successfully prove to the Home Office or immigration tribunals that they are genuinely fleeing danger and persecution. Currently, most of them are granted the right to permanent residence after five years.
In the year ending June 2025, civil servants approved 48 per cent of the 109,902 asylum applications they considered, according to official statistics. In the same period, 45 per cent of appeals against rejection were successful in immigration tribunals.
Mahmood is expected to say that the UK will follow Denmark’s lead by giving only temporary refuge to those who show they fled genuine danger, while only those who have been personally targeted for persecution are likely to receive indefinite residency. Those granted temporary protection would be obliged to return to their home countries if they became safe again.
The home secretary will also argue that the UK is seen as a “soft touch” — although data shows it receives fewer asylum claims than other European countries, including Germany, Spain, France and Italy.
The changes are the latest effort by the government to show it has a grip on clandestine immigration, amid fears the high level of arrivals leaves it vulnerable to the challenge of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Last month, the Home Office confirmed that the number of small boat arrivals in 2025 had already passed the 36,816 figure for the whole of 2024, although it remains lower than a record high of around 45,000 in 2022.
BBC reports on November 8 revealed that Mahmood had sent officials to Copenhagen to study what the Home Office called Denmark’s “success” in reducing clandestine immigration.
Colin Yeo, an immigration barrister, criticised the plans, saying reviewing refugees’ status would use “precious resources at the Home Office” and would still rarely lead to returns.
He pointed out that many of the countries that refugees had fled — such as Somalia and Afghanistan — did not tend to get any safer.
“Refugees will still be living here in the long term, but reforms like this make it harder for them to integrate and contribute, which is in nobody’s best interests,” Yeo said.
The home secretary is also expected to announce steps to oblige the courts to take less account of some provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights that she believes have made it harder to deport from the UK people whose asylum claims have been rejected.
However, she will not flesh out proposals announced in August by her predecessor Yvette Cooper to replace immigration appeals tribunals with an arbitration body.
A full version of those proposals is expected to be announced at a later date.