Plan to extend settlement wait to up to 30 years for 200,000 successful asylum applicants in the UK draws criticism

UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has been accused of causing distress and uncertainty by quietly hardening settlement plans for refugees. The Refugee Council said the change could force a large cohort of successful asylum applicants to wait up to 30 years.

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, according to the report.

Mahmood announced a series of immigration proposals on Monday. Some of them softened the rules for care workers and their families after unions, cabinet members and backbench Labour MPs voiced concerns, the report said.

Under the new plans, refugees who arrive by irregular means, for example by small boat, will face a 30-year wait for settlement in the UK.

Last year's consultation included a proposal that people who arrived irregularly would face a 10-year penalty. However, this was not expected to apply to those who had been granted refugee status, according to the report.

Mahmood wrote last year that refugees would be spared the 10-year penalty. In a post on X on 21 November 2025, sharing an image of the white cliffs of Dover, she wrote that 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 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 five years' leave as a result of an asylum claim or further submissions made by 1 March 2026 would remain eligible to apply for settlement after five years.

That guarantee has been quietly dropped in the small print of the government's latest immigration plan released on Monday, according to the report. Footnote 14 in the Home Office document 'A fairer pathway to settlement' says refugees not on safe and legal routes who claimed asylum before 2 March 2026 will move to core protection.

Under core protection, 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, the report said.

Jon Featonby, chief policy analyst at the Refugee Council, said repeatedly changing positions on what refugees should expect will cause distress and huge uncertainty. Thousands who thought they were weeks or months away from settlement could now have to wait another 25 years, and it is impossible to start new lives while living with a temporary status that expires every 30 months for 30 years, he said.

Featonby added that the plans will also cause chaos for the Home Office, which will have decades of repeated extra applications to process at enormous cost to the public purse.

Responding to the Refugee Council's analysis, the Home Office said there had been no policy change since last year's proposals, but declined to comment further on Mahmood's comments on X or the footnote in the recent document.

Mahmood told MPs on Monday that 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 she set out before parliament that day.