New UK Asylum Rules 2026: 30-Month Refugee Leave Explained

New asylum rules start to bite

The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has been talking a lot recently about making claiming asylum tougher and more onerous, and already it is starting to happen, but the way is rather obscure.

She made a Written Statement in Parliament on Monday 2nd March which informs us, amongst various other things, that these changes will work like this:

Under these changes, adults and accompanied children claiming asylum from today will receive a 30-month period of protection, if granted. At a 30-month review, refugees with a continuing need of sanctuary will have their protection renewed, while those whose countries are now deemed safe will be expected to return home.

Note the words “from today”, which apparently means just what it says. So anybody who claimed asylum from Monday 2nd onwards is engaged by the new rules. But are they “rules”? Well no, not exactly. At the moment the change only comes in the document, but no matter, new immigration rules are apparently going to be published “later this week”, and there is a lot more detail to come. It is clear that refugee settlement is going to become harder than it was and, as we already know, the refugee family reunion route has been “paused”. 

So what will be the difference between this new refugee leave scheme and the scheme that existing until very recently? Well, until very recently asylum-seekers received five years’ leave – with leave either as a Refugee or Holder of Humanitarian Protection, which were similar in effect.

But now – and to put it in a rather simpler way – they will receive 30 months’ leave instead. (As many people will be aware, 30 months is a common period of leave with family visas and a few other types.) The Home Secretary makes a lot of the apparent legal fact that only those with a continuing need for protection will have their leave renewed, but we rather thought that it was supposed to be like that anyway. Home Office policy on protection settlement applications already said something closely similar, although you might say that the emphasis has changed. 

Two things come strongly to mind in this respect. 

Firstly, the situation in Syria until some time in late 2024 was chaotic and generally dangerous but with the fall of the Assad regime and the advent of the new al-Sharaa regime things improved significantly and Syria is supposedly or arguably safer. There were many Syrian nationals in the UK who had claimed or successfully claimed asylum but whose cases were stalled for the time being. Those who had been granted asylum and who might have been in line to apply for Refugee Settlement could not do so. 

In regards to this unusual situation Asylum Minister Dame Angela Eagle stated that the pause: “was a necessary step while there was no stable, objective information available to make robust assessments of risk on return to Syria”.

Now the situation was changed and the Home Office took it upon itself to consider whether such people needed protection any longer, and they wrote to them seeking their point of view. In an individual case the outcome could be that protection status is removed and the migrant will no longer have any such basis to remain in UK. The main magic legal words here are “significant and non-temporary change” in the country of origin.

So suffice to say that “safe return review” is by no means a new concept. 

Secondly (and this something relatively new), the US armed forces have recently been pulverising Iran. As everybody knows, Iran has a very poor human rights record and it produces a lot of asylum-seekers. The US Administration veers wildly on this subject but when they are in a certain mood they talk about encouraging regime change.

If this really does happen and if Iran becomes something like a democracy or liberal society then of course this will change the whole political landscape and, as with Syria, safe return review may come up on the agenda.

But the situation in Syria is currently uncertain and in Iran vastly more so.

Oliver Westmoreland

Senior Immigration Lawyer