Immigration Reforms

Apsana Begum Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered immigration reforms.

It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Mr Stringer. What an extraordinary few weeks we have had in the area of home affairs and immigration. It has been quite breathtaking. It is difficult to grasp the scale and ferocity of the Home Secretary’s assault on immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the past few weeks. It is simply astonishing that in a few short weeks she has turned nearly all our assumptions about refugee status and asylum totally on their head. She has embarked on one of the biggest set of reforms on asylum and immigration that we have witnessed in the past few years, and all without one Government-sponsored debate on the Floor of the House and without one single vote for Members.

We had barely caught our breath from the outrageous changes to indefinite leave to remain and its associated earned settlement restrictions when there was an almost daily blitz of further cruel and restrictive measures. In case the House has forgotten, I will refresh Members on what has been announced, because it is totally extraordinary. First, at the beginning of March the Home Secretary arbitrarily announced that refugee status was to be completely redefined, from something that had always been akin to a permanent status to something that would be temporary. It was to be reduced from five years to 30 months, with the proviso that people may be returned to their countries of origin if the Home Secretary, exclusively and on her own, deemed those countries to be safe.

Let us think about what that will do to people and families. It will lock people into years of insecurity, denying them the opportunity to rebuild shattered lives. It will prolong uncertainty for refugee families, making it almost impossible to make decisions about education for children and for these poor souls to find positive employment. What employer is going to spend money hiring, training and investing in people if there is a chance they will be booted out of the country within the next two and a half years?

[Apsana Begum (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on securing this important debate. Is he concerned, like me, about what the reforms will mean for the survivors of abuse who have fled persecution abroad? Does he agree that perpetrators already weaponise immigration status against their victims, and that removing refugee protection will lead only to survivors having even less access to support and being too scared of deportation to leave?

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Lady is spot on, and entirely right to raise those issues. The changes will effectively retraumatise so many asylum seekers and refugees who have already experienced of all sorts of abusive arrangements. I am glad the Minister is here to listen to the hon. Lady’s remarks.

Only a couple of days after the announcement on refugee status, the Home Secretary announced what she called an “emergency brake” on visa applications from nationals from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan. Those are some of the most dangerous countries in the world, where conflict, oppression and human rights abuses are an everyday feature and continue to drive people from their homes. The Home Secretary says she wants to expand safe and legal routes, but at one stroke she took away meaningful safe and legal routes from some of the most dangerous countries in the world.

Not content with that, the Home Secretary then went on to announce a pilot scheme offering financial inducements for failed asylum seekers to return to their country of origin. It was a voluntary scheme, but only in the context of, “If you refuse that inducement, you may be forcibly removed.” The proposal is chillingly reminiscent of what we are seeing in the United States, where Trump’s paramilitary Immigration and Customs Enforcement force is forcibly evicting people who are on the wrong side of the refugee and asylum system there.

The Home Secretary actually said—I could not believe it when I heard it—that she is currently consulting on how removals can be carried out “humanely and effectively”, particularly where children are involved. Let us pause and think for a minute about the forcible removal of families in the United Kingdom where children might be involved.

Even after that—this was in only one week—it went on. Next, the Home Secretary announced changes to the law that will mean it is no longer a legal duty to provide financial support to asylum seekers. Payments will stop for anyone working illegally, anyone convicted of a crime or anyone with independent financial means. I am sure people listen to that and think, “That sounds fair enough and pretty reasonable. If people are in any of those categories, it’s quite right that they shouldn’t receive Government support.”

But that is only until we consider what is required for an asylum seeker to work in the United Kingdom. They can work only with the permission of the Home Office, and securing that permission is a complex, byzantine, bureaucratic task that some people in the asylum community say is barely possible. The only thing that will be achieved is more people being put into destitution. If we look at the Trussell Trust or any of the food banks, we see that the number of asylum seekers who are now seeking assistance and help is going through the roof—and it will only go further.

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[Graham Leadbitter (Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) on securing this important debate.

Right across my constituency, through the highlands and islands, across Aberdeenshire and right across Scotland, successive Governments continue to fail our communities, our public services and our businesses with immigration policy that bears no scrutiny when it comes to labour requirements. Many Members have talked about the hardships faced by refugees and the impact on their lives, and the humanity or otherwise of our actions. I agree with those sentiments, but I am going to focus on the big impact on employment, and how that impacts the communities in my constituency.

Every day in Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey, there are people with care needs that cannot be fully met and businesses that cannot be staffed, not because of lack of budget, but because of lack of labour. “But,” say some, “there are people in the UK who can do these jobs,” but are there, really? In areas like my constituency, much of which is a two-and-a-half-hour drive north of Perth, which itself is an hour north of Edinburgh and five hours north of London—we are talking about somewhere that is 11-plus hours from here—are we really going to drag people away from their families and friends to do these jobs, when there has been and there could be a willing workforce to do them, contribute to our communities and be part of a constructive, progressive and successful whole? People do come by choice and love the places they move to, but their number does not come close to closing the gap between labour demand and labour availability.

The fact is that before Brexit there was far more labour available to care and hospitality. Sadly, that has disappeared in broken Brexit Britain. Care providers that do have foreign workers under excessively strict working visa rules are often left with the utterly invidious choice of not fulfilling care needs of vulnerable clients, or breaking visa rules on hours worked in order to do so. They are then punished severely simply for the act of caring, which is a disturbingly dystopian situation. Business leaders across Scotland, in Federation of Small Businesses branches and chambers of commerce, point to labour shortages and the stalling of economic growth as a result of current immigration policy.

[Apsana Begum]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government need urgently—today—to provide clarity on those constituents, perhaps of his and certainly of mine, who came through the European Community association agreement route and have had applications for renewals and other elements paused since November 2025? They are now in complete limbo, although they are eligible as of this month to apply for indefinite leave to remain.

[Graham Leadbitter]

Absolutely. That is just another example of delays in a system that does not work—a system that is not able to process applications or to deal with the legitimate issues that are raised by people within it in a timely and reasonable way. These are people who could be doing jobs, paying taxes and contributing to society, but have restrictions placed on what they can do and how they can live their lives.

Scottish Labour says it supports a more bespoke immigration system for Scotland, which would be great if its own Ministers paid any attention to it. The oppressive and stifling immigration rules that were imposed by the previous Conservative Government and are now being copper clad by, of all people, a Labour Government, are deeply damaging to the highlands, Moray and far beyond. Will the Government take responsibility for the harms that they are inflicting on vulnerable citizens whose care needs cannot be met from our current working population, and on those in the hard-pressed hospitality sector who cannot provide the service they wish or grow their businesses to meet demand due to an immigration policy that utterly fails them?

--- Later in debate ---

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Clapham and Brixton Hill) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) for leading this debate. My Government came to power promising a fairer Britain, so I have to ask plainly, who exactly are all these immigration proposals for? They are not designed for the people I represent, who help to keep this country running.

I want to start with the thousands of children and young people who have grown up in the UK and who are being pushed to the margins of the immigration system. They are being made to pay child citizenship fees of £1,214 to register as a British citizen. The Home Office’s own figures show that it makes a profit of £840 on each application. The fee is not an administrative cost; it is a revenue-raising exercise targeted at children, and it results in tens of thousands of children who have a legal right to British citizenship being priced out of it. They do not discover the consequences of that until later in life. Members may be wondering why I am still talking about this issue, given that the Government made a commitment in the House to reduce the financial burden on families and to address the issue specifically, but in all the proposals, I have not heard anything about it, and the fee remains the highest in Europe.

The Government are also proposing to double the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain. The idea that we would apply it retrospectively undermines the foundation of trust on which people make decisions when they come to work in the UK. They put down roots based on the rules that they are given when they apply. Those families are attempting to live and work in this country based on the promises that were made. We will drag people into an endless cycle of visa applications and unpredictable fees, sitting alongside an asylum and accommodation system where private providers make millions from Government contracts despite repeated reports of mismanagement, abuse and dangerous conditions. In turn, we turn around and blame those who are the most vulnerable—those seeking asylum—and change their conditions.

[Apsana Begum]

On danger and protections, does my hon. Friend agree that the Government must maintain the existing protections for survivors of domestic violence who have fled persecution and violence abroad, including the migrant victims of domestic abuse concession and the domestic violence ILR protection?