Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has confirmed a new “safe and legal” route to Britain for groups including Palestinian refugees, and women and girls from Afghanistan.
As she announced the re-opening of the UK Resettlement Scheme, two years after it was effectively suspended, Mahmood also signalled that she was prepared to water down some of her more stringent planned migration reforms in response to a Labour backlash. She told the Labour party conference the government was seeking “a position that balances fairness for those who came here legally, and fairness to British citizens across this country”.
What are the current legal routes?
“Safe and legal routes” are “authorised immigration arrangements” which allow a person to “move to another country for humanitarian reasons”, said a House of Commons Library briefing. In the UK, those consist of the UK Resettlement Scheme, Community Sponsorship and the Mandate Scheme, all of which cater for vulnerable refugees referred by the United Nations Refugee Agency. In 2024, the UK Resettlement Scheme closed to new referrals, effectively shutting it off as a legal route.
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The Mandate Scheme resettles refugees who have a close family member in the UK who is willing to accommodate them. Community Sponsorship allows groups of local citizens, charities, and faith organisations to directly welcome, house, and support resettled refugee families. These schemes have been “operating at very limited capacity in recent years”, said the briefing.
Over the past five years, the UK has created specific “humanitarian pathways” for people from Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan. Since 2020, these bespoke schemes account for the vast majority of those who have arrived in the UK through safe and legal routes. Almost half of the 575,000 arrivals have been Ukrainians, followed by Hong Kong citizens (186,000). Another 62,000 people came to the UK through the refugee family reunion route, and 38,000 came through three resettlement schemes for Afghan citizens who had assisted British forces.
What is the new legal migration route?
Under the reopened resettlement scheme, the government expects about one in four arrivals to be Afghan women and girls or Palestinian refugees. A Home Office briefing says admissions will initially be capped and are expected to “number in the hundreds at first, but this will grow into the low thousands as levels of illegal migration fall”.
Those eligible will be identified in partnership with the United Nations Refugee Agency and the International Refugee Assistance Project. All candidates will undergo security and criminality checks before they travel to the UK.
New arrivals will be placed on a five-year path to permanent settlement in the UK. “This is, by design, more generous than those who arrive by small boat or other illegal means”, the Home Office said, and intended to “disincentivise illegal routes”.
Mahmood had announced plans to increase the timeline for permanent residence for legal migrants from five years to up to 15 years. The changes would apply retrospectively to migrants who arrived in Britain after 2021. But she has now signalled a rethink after Angela Rayner and up to 100 Labour MPs petitioned Mahmood to exclude around 185,000 foreign-born care workers from the stricter rules.
Will the new scheme be effective?
“The government deserves credit for creating new safe and legal routes that will help refugees reach the UK without risking their lives”, Jon Featonby, chief policy analyst at the Refugee Council, told The Guardian. Such routes are “essential to undermining people-smugglers’ business model, but they only work if they operate at scale”, which means “thousands of places, not hundreds”.
However, said the newspaper, the scheme “is likely to attract criticism from the right, especially as women and girls and people with disabilities are the most likely to be dependent on the welfare state”.
