UK
The Wrong Prescription – Why Labour Must Rethink Its Approach To Asylum
NOVEMBER 21, 2025
By Rathi Guhadasan
The Socialist Health Association condemns the asylum reforms announced this week by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, which represent a deeply concerning erosion of fundamental health and human rights protections for some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
A Betrayal of Health Equity Principles
The proposal to make refugee status temporary, subject to regular review every 30 months, and to extend the pathway to settlement from five to twenty years creates a system of prolonged insecurity that is fundamentally incompatible with public health principles. People living in limbo for two decades will face chronic stress, mental health deterioration, and barriers to accessing preventative healthcare. Refugees and asylum seekers have complex health needs, influenced by experiences in their home country, during their journey or after arrival in the UK. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that they use NHS services disproportionately – in fact, migrants to the UK use fewer resources than their native counterparts.
By removing the statutory duty to provide housing and financial support to asylum seekers, the government is creating conditions that will drive vulnerable people into destitution, homelessness, and exploitative situations. These are precisely the circumstances in which infectious diseases spread, mental health crises deepen, and people present to emergency services in extremis—at far greater cost to the NHS than preventative support would require.
Ignoring the NHS’s Reliance on Refugee and Migrant Workers
The Home Secretary’s rhetoric frames refugees as a burden while conveniently ignoring the fact that many refugees and asylum seekers have been, are, or will become essential NHS workers. Our health service has long depended on the skills, dedication, and compassion of doctors, nurses, care workers, and other health professionals who came to the UK seeking safety.
From doctors fleeing persecution to care workers rebuilding their lives, refugee communities have filled critical workforce gaps and provided culturally sensitive care to diverse patient populations. To treat people seeking asylum as unwelcome whilst simultaneously relying on migrant workers to sustain our health system is hypocritical and short-sighted.
Rights-Based Concerns
These proposals violate the fundamental right to health, which is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the WHO Constitution and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, all of which include the UK as a signatory. Moreover, the NHS constitution states that the NHS “is available to all irrespective of gender, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion, belief, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity or marital or civil partnership status. The service is designed to improve, prevent, diagnose and treat both physical and mental health problems with equal regard. It has a duty to each and every individual that it serves and must respect their human rights. At the same time, it has a wider social duty to promote equality through the services it provides and to pay particular attention to groups or sections of society where improvements in health and life expectancy are not keeping pace with the rest of the population.”
Potential impacts of the proposed asylum reforms include:
- Discrimination in access to care: Removing guaranteed support will create a two-tier system where asylum seekers’ ability to maintain their health depends on their circumstances, not their needs.
- Family separation: Removing automatic rights to family reunion tears apart support networks essential for mental and physical wellbeing, particularly for children and survivors of trauma.
- Unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors misclassified as adults: As withcurrent so-called “scientific methods” of age assessment, concerns have been raised about proposals to use AI-based Facial Age Estimation. This technology, which cannot take into account ethnic differences and visible aging from trauma, grief, sun exposure or malnutrition, could lead to vulnerable teenagers under 18 years being denied protection, placed in dangerous situations at risk of abuse and even deported.
- Return to unsafe conditions: Forcing people to return to countries deemed “safe” ignores ongoing health infrastructure collapse, persecution of minorities, and the specific vulnerabilities of individuals—especially those with chronic conditions or disabilities.
- Barriers to integration: The 20-year pathway to settlement prevents refugees from fully participating in society, accessing training, and contributing their skills—including in healthcare professions where we desperately need them.
A Race to the Bottom
The government’s boast that it is modelling these policies on Denmark—one of Europe’s strictest systems which it has previously called racist and in breach of human rights law—reveals a troubling willingness to abandon compassion in favour of deterrence. This is not evidence-based policymaking; it is an attempt to outflank the far-right by adopting their framing that refugees are a problem to be managed rather than people with rights to be protected.
As health professionals and public health advocates, we know that punitive asylum policies do not deter desperate people fleeing war, persecution, and torture. They simply ensure that people arrive here more traumatised, more vulnerable, and in greater need of healthcare intervention.
We call on the Labour government to:
- abandon these regressive reforms and return to a rights-based approach to asylum,
- recognise refugees’ contributions to British society, including to our NHS,
- invest in properly resourced, humane asylum processing that prioritises health and dignity,
- consult with health organisations, refugee communities, and frontline workers before implementing any changes to asylum policy, and
- acknowledge that protecting refugee health rights is not only a moral imperative but a public health necessity
This is not about politics; it is about humanity, evidence, and the kind of society we want to build. A healthy society is one that protects the vulnerable, not one that competes to treat them more harshly.
The SHA stands in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers, and all those working to defend their rights.
Dr Rathi Guhadasan is Chair of the Socialist Health Association.
Image: Banner on the Make Them Pay demonstration in London on September 20th, c/o Labour Hub
BFAWU stands with migrant members amidst government attacks
By Sarah Woolley, General Secretary, BFAWU
The BFAWU Executive Council is alarmed by the Home Secretary’s announcement yesterday, and by the direction it signals for the UK’s asylum system. The government’s statement that refugee status will become temporary, that the pathway to settlement will be significantly lengthened, and that support for people seeking safety may be withdrawn raises profound concerns about fairness, human rights, and the functioning of our economy.
In her statement, Shabana Mahmood said the current system is “out of control” and that the UK must move to a “core protection” regime where leave to remain is reduced (from five years to around 30 months) and where permanent settlement will only be available after a much longer period (potentially up to 20 years). She also proposed removing the automatic duty to provide accommodation and financial support for some asylum seekers, particularly those who can work but choose not to, or who break rules.
We welcome the government’s stated aim of reducing exploitation and safeguarding decent work, but we strongly reject the notion that migrating workers, including those who arrived as asylum seekers, are a “problem” to be solved by shrinking their rights and pushing them into precarity.
We make the following points:
- The food industry, like many other sectors, relies heavily on migrant labour, including people who first came as asylum seekers. Without them, production, processing, distribution and retail would face serious disruption.
- Many of our members are migrant workers. They perform essential roles, pay taxes, and contribute to our communities. To treat them as disposable, or condition their status on arbitrary deadlines and support-withdrawal, is both morally wrong and economically unsound.
- The Home Secretary’s statement that refugee status will be temporary, subject to review, and that home countries will be deemed “safe” for return after short periods without guaranteeing genuine safety or protection is deeply troubling from a human-rights standpoint.
- We deplore the language of “illegal migration” used to sweepingly characterise people seeking safety. As the BFAWU has consistently said: there is no such thing as an “illegal person”, only a status which the state determines.
- The risk is that these reforms will create a two-tier workforce: people with insecure status who are vulnerable to exploitation, fear of deportation, and denial of rights. This undermines the fight for decent work, proper pay and safe conditions that unions champion.
- From a union and broader labour movement perspective, the focus must be on rights, dignity and stability, not on temporary, conditional entitlements that can be removed on a whim.
We call on the government to:
- Recognise the real contribution of migrant workers, a number of whom arrived as asylum seekers, to the UK economy and to sectors such as food production and allied industries.
- Refrain from reducing protections or creating instability in workers’ rights in the name of migration control.
- Guarantee that those granted asylum or protection are treated with dignity, given secure status and rights comparable to other workers, not condemned to limbo or fear.
- Prioritise enforcement against labour exploitation rather than penalising people exercising the human right to seek safety.
- Adopt immigration and asylum policies rooted in solidarity, human rights and economic realism, not in rhetoric that undermines workers, divides communities and endangers the dignity of working people.
The BFAWU stands with our migrant members; we stand for the principle that everyone who works here, who contributes here, deserves to be treated with respect and given secure rights. We reject any policy that says “you are welcome” but only temporarily, under threat, or only if you can meet ever-shifting conditions.
- Sarah Woolley is General Secretary of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union – you can follow her on Twitter/X.
- You can follow the BFAWU on Facebook, Twitter/X and Instagram.
- This was originally published on the BFAWU website on 18 November 2025.
- If you support Labour Outlook’s work amplifying the voices of left movements and struggles here and internationally, please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.
