On Monday 13 July, MPs debated the Immigration and Asylum Bill at its Second Reading. This new major piece of immigration legislation, the fifth to come before Parliament in five sessions, lands amidst a wider set of changes already reshaping the asylum system, and puts into law several measures announced in last November’s Restoring Order and Control statement.

The Bill marks the next step in the Government’s plan to combine refugee status and humanitarian protection into a single ‘core protection’ model. While the Bill contains little detail on how this would work operationally, all the evidence suggests that the proposed model will give people seeking sanctuary insecurity, rather than stability.

Refugees are now granted 30 months’ leave rather than five years, and under the ‘core protection’ model could see their status reassessed repeatedly over a 20-year route to settlement. Evidence from the existing 10-year route tells us the consequence of long, insecure routes to settlement: insecure work, debt from repeated legal and application fees, and housing instability. The more applications a person must make, the greater the risk that a missed deadline or unaffordable fee pushes them out of lawful status altogether. This is compounded by the chronic shortage of free immigration advice, with two-thirds of the UK now being an immigration legal aid desert.

The Bill would also allow the Home Office to recover up to £10,000 in asylum support from people once granted status — support that is only available to people who are destitute, and who are banned from working while their claim is decided. A person would not be eligible for settlement until this debt is paid off, binding them further to the long, insecure routes described above.

This ‘refugee tax’ risks pushing people into destitution and will further impede refugees’ integration in the UK. It may deter people seeking sanctuary from accessing asylum support at all, leaving them more vulnerable to homelessness, and to exploitation in the labour and housing markets. With no estimate of how much the policy would raise, or what enforcing it would cost, its benefits are wholly unclear.

Meanwhile, the independent, judge-led appeals tribunal would be replaced with a body whose adjudicators need not be legally qualified. The complexity of immigration law is precisely why Parliament required immigration advisers to be legally qualified in the first place. Asylum decisions can be life or death decisions, and it is not clear that the new adjudicators will possess the expertise these decisions warrant. Government data consistently points to poor-quality asylum decision-making, with around two thirds of appeals currently ending in the Home Office’s initial refusal being found to be flawed. A weaker, less independent route to challenge poor decisions — at a time when the appeals backlog stands at over 87,000 cases — will inevitably mean more people being wrongly refused asylum, cut off from support, and at risk of street homelessness.

The Bill also seeks to constrain how Article 8 (the right to private and family life) is applied in immigration cases, risking further restrictions on refugee family reunion and on the rights of children settled in this country. It also extends the powers of enforcement agencies in response to modern slavery, while reducing the protections available to survivors; measures which threaten to increase the control of abusers and heighten the risk of re-trafficking.

Combined, these reforms pose a real threat to the Government’s own commitments on ending rough sleeping, tackling child poverty, and delivering its first refugee integration strategy since 2009.

As the Bill moves to Committee Stage, we’ll be working with members and partners to push for an asylum system that offers safety and stability, not destitution and debt.

In the meantime, you can read more about the Immigration and Asylum Bill here: