Fast-track deportations to be announced as part of asylum reforms

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will announce plans to speed up deportations of illegal immigrants as part of a radical overhaul of the UK’s asylum policy.

In a statement to MPs on Monday, he will outline his plans to end multiple appeals against the expulsion and for a review of human rights legislation.

Those granted asylum will only be granted temporarily and will be returned to their homes if their country is ever deemed safe. They will have to wait 20 years to request permanent installation.

Mahmood also warns that the UK will stop granting visas to people from three African countries if their governments do not improve cooperation in removing illegal immigrants.

Mahmood told the BBC on Sunday: “This is a moral mission for me, because I can see that illegal migration is tearing our country apart, it is dividing communities.”

Conservative Home Secretary Chris Philp said he would go further and deport rejected asylum seekers “within a week”.

The plans have sparked criticism from some Labor MPs, including Rachael Maskell, who said the government was going in “the completely wrong direction” on immigration.

The government wants to reduce the number of people arriving in the UK on small boats and the reforms aim to speed up deportations of failed asylum seekers and foreign criminals, as well as make it harder for successful asylum seekers to stay.

Under the plans, people will be restricted to arguing their grounds of appeal within a single appeal and, if the case fails, they will be deported.

The government will follow the Danish model of creating an independent body to expedite the deportation of foreign criminals and cases with little prospect of success through the appeals system.

As part of the reforms, Mahmood wants to review how human rights legislation, including Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which covers the right to family life, is applied in migration court cases.

Only those who have immediate family in the UK, such as a parent or child, will be able to use Article 8 as a reason to stay.

The UK will join other countries in reforming Article 3 of the ECHR, which is designed to give people protection from inhuman or degrading treatment.

The government believes this has been used to support unreasonable claims, including blocking the deportation of serious criminals because their health care needs cannot be met.

Similarly, the Home Office said the Modern Slavery Act will be tightened to prevent last-minute claims to block the expulsion.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the reforms would end “endless calls” to increase deportations of “those who have no right to be here”.

Mahmood said the reforms recognized that the “pace and scale” of immigration had destabilized and divided communities and would allow the government to speed up the removal of those who have no right to be in Britain.

He continued: “To maintain the generosity that allows us to provide shelter, we must restore order and control.”

Previously, the Home Secretary told the BBC she would create new safe and legal routes for refugees through work and study routes.

Under the new measures, stricter restrictions will be imposed on successful asylum seekers, whose cases will be reviewed every two and a half years and, if their home country is deemed safe, they will be returned.

A refugee will need to have resided in the UK for 20 years, compared to the current five years, to be able to apply for permanent residence or indefinite leave to remain.

They will not be able to bring family members to join them unless they are immediate relatives, including parents and children, and asylum seekers will not be guaranteed accommodation or weekly allowances.

Asylum applications in Britain are at a record level, with around 111,000 applications in the year to June 2025, according to official figures.

The appeals system currently has a backlog of more than 50,000 and a wait time of at least a year.

There has also been criticism of the proposed reforms from within the Labor Party, with Maskell saying many of his fellow MPs were “really concerned”.

He said it was important to have a strong human rights framework and described “reordering our relationship with the ECHR” as a “step too far”.

Reform leader Nigel Farage said the Home Secretary “looks like a reform supporter”.

“It is a shame that the Human Rights Act, the ECtHR and their own MPs mean this will never happen,” he added.

Liberal Democrats home affairs spokesman Max Wilkinson said the government should “focus on processing applications quickly, getting it right first time and quickly deporting people who have no right to be here”.

Enver Solomon, executive director of the Refugee Council, said that rather than deterring migrants, the 20-year deadline would “leave people in limbo and tense anxiety for many, many years.”

As first reported in the Times, the threat of a visa ban for Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo comes after thousands of illegal immigrants and criminals from the three nations were said to be in the UK.

A Home Office source said the countries were being attacked “for their unacceptably low cooperation and obstructive return processes”.