The Home Office proposes raising the bar against which immigrants applying for settled status are already assessed, in four areas: character, integration, economic contribution and residence. It also proposes new (undefined) criteria “pertaining to the public good”. With a few exceptions, these proposals apply to all immigrants awaiting settlement, not just the 12% with experience of the asylum system (2024 figures).

In a throwback to early Victorian values (think the debtors’ prison in Dickens’ Little Dorrit), one of the Home Office’s proposed measures of ‘character’ is debt – ironic given the enforced poverty already inbuilt into the asylum system, where the Home Office bars applicants from working and gives them £49.18/week to live on. Upon being recognised as refugees, people have no savings and 28 days (56, in select cases) before eviction – not enough time to land a job, find lodging and become self-supporting. In such circumstances, incurring debt is a matter of survival, not ‘character’.

The Home Office plan to make language skills its yardstick for integration means that English would be used -- in the Coalition for Language Education’s phrase – “less as a means of empowerment and more as a mechanism of [ ] control”.  In NI this would be patently unfair: competition for places to study English is fierce, and far too many would-be students are left without. Does the Home Office seriously propose punishing newcomers for the lack of English classes? What about the sizeable cohort of 14-to-16 year olds who by NI law should be in school – but aren’t, as no secondary school will give them a place and there is nothing else on offer?

The Home Office proposal to make the wait time for settlement contingent on earnings disadvantages refugees, who, as Migration Observatory note, tend to have lower employment rates initially. In NI new refugees – if they get emergency accommodation at all – are frequently placed in hotels far from their former homes, without access to cooking or laundry facilities. Children have no means of getting to school, increasing parents’ care burden. Single men sofa surf or are street homeless. All of this hinders people from finding and keeping work. (It also prevents them from ‘earning’ a reduced wait by volunteering – another Home Office proposal, roundly condemned as immoral and exploitative by over 300 charities working with volunteers.)

Planning to penalise people who, in order to meet their basic needs, have accessed benefits to which they are entitled under NI law (and international standards on non-discrimination and access to social security) is unworthy of a society that prizes ‘fairness’.

Many new refugees – like others with disabilities, ill health or care duties -- would much prefer to work but are prevented by circumstances from doing so. Planning to penalise people who, in order to meet their basic needs, have accessed benefits to which they are entitled under NI law (and international standards on non-discrimination and access to social security) is unworthy of a society that prizes ‘fairness’. It would force parents to choose between meeting their children’s immediate needs or extending the family’s time in limbo.

Under ‘residence’, the Home Office proposes lengthening wait times depending on how a person arrived in the UK.  As UNHCR has repeatedly stated, under international law there is “no ‘right way’ for an individual to gain access to territory to seek international protection. Access to territory … is one of the essential rights laid down in the Refugee Convention”. This is doubly true given that currently, the Home Office only has ‘safe routes’ for people fleeing Hong Kong and Ukraine: the plan to penalise everyone else is disingenuous at best.

Who would bear the brunt of these proposed changes?  A March 2025 report from IPPR – which should have informed Home Office proposals – found that the existing “prolonged settlement routes, unaffordable visa renewal fees and No Recourse to Public Funds [designation] have had a direct impact on families’ financial security”.  Barnardos expressed parallel concerns:

family migration is primarily presented as a risk to be ‘managed’ or ‘controlled’. For example, proposals to lengthen routes to settlement would mean that children – including children born in the UK and whose parents are in work - could have a further five years in poverty, without any access to the safety net available to others… Such measures risk introducing additional barriers to the love, care and security that families provide to their children. 

The Home Office developed this plan in the teeth of the Refugee Convention, which calls for a naturalisation process that is as speedy and accessible as possible; and of evidence from IPPR, Citizens UK and others that the existing long waits for settlement already hinder integration amongst all immigrants affected. These proposals are not a policy response to the need to integrate refugees. They are a political manifesto for a Government unwilling to stand up for its own commitments and values.