To Shabana Mahmood the “comparative generosity” of Britain’s asylum offer has led to asylum claims falling across Europe but rising here. Is she right? It is not that the UK’s subsistence offer is particularly lavish — a single asylum seeker receives just £7 a day, compared with £13 in Germany — nor do British asylum seekers enjoy better rights than those in other countries (they can work after six months in France, compared with a year here).
Rather, to the home secretary the real British premium lies in certainty: a five-year grant, with almost automatic permanent settled status thereafter. Britain will now follow Denmark’s lead, making asylum offers temporary, with a review two-and-a-half years later. Will it bring down the number of arrivals?
Policymakers have spent decades trying to understand what factors determine where asylum seekers go. But one variable is, quite simply, how many asylum claims are approved.
In the early 2000s Tony Blair’s Labour government was faced with the prospect of 100,000 asylum claims a year from places like Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and eastern Europe. But many new arrivals from safe “white list” countries were either detained or removed, often with no chance of appeal. In 2004 just 12 per cent of asylum applications were granted.
In the 2010s such tough practices were ruled unlawful by the High Court, and today’s asylum seekers have considerably better odds. In the year ending June 2025, about 111,000 people claimed asylum in Britain. Unlike during the New Labour years, the British state granted asylum to nearly half of them.
In other words, the “grant rate” of asylum seekers went from about 12 per cent in 2004 to 77 per cent in 2022 and now sits at 48 per cent. It is even higher for those who arrive by small boat, at 56 per cent.
For recent would-be asylum seekers, the numbers associated with trying for Britain are much more favourable. The UK avoided most of the European migrant crisis of 2015, receiving just 3 per cent of Europe’s asylum claims. Today the figure is 10 per cent.
There are a few possible reasons, explains Peter Walsh of the Oxford Migration Observatory. One is that before people smugglers proved otherwise, the Channel was not seen as a feasible entry point for prospective arrivals. The other is that Brexit deprived Britain of access to the EU asylum database, thus effectively giving those who have been denied asylum on the Continent another bite of the cherry.
In the past three years some steps have been taken to harden Britain’s approach. The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 forced officials to use a higher bar for asylum cases. The approval rate for Afghans went from 99 per cent in 2023 to 40 per cent in the most recent figures. Overall rates for all nationalities are now in line with the EU average.
Yet for the nationalities most likely to apply to Britain the odds do remain favourable. The EU, for example, granted just 41 per cent of Iranian asylum applications in 2024, but Britain approved 67 per cent. The EU granted 22 per cent of Pakistani applications last year, while Britain granted 51 per cent.
There were 11,350 asylum applications from Pakistan in the year to June, more than from any other country. Along with Bangladesh (in fourth place) and India (fifth), nearly all of the applicants from these countries have overstayed work and study visas, rather than arrived on small boats. To these claimants, whose existing visas may be near expiry, seeking asylum offers another (almost 50-50) chance to stay in Britain.
But there is another point to consider. We know half of asylum claims are rejected, a share that shrinks after the appeals process. But even if your claim is denied, your chance of being made to leave has so far been vanishingly small.
Consider the maths. In 2010, 72 per cent of the 7,825 people who were denied asylum were recorded as leaving the country. But the percentage has fallen drastically: the latest data shows just 21 per cent of asylum seekers rejected in 2021 have been recorded as leaving. The upshot is that of the 129,000 people who have been denied asylum since 2010, only 54,000 have definitely left. Some of the remaining 75,000 may indeed have quietly departed, but many of the rest will have — even more quietly — stayed.
In his 2004 Labour Party conference speech Blair made a bold pledge to remove more failed asylum seekers than were applying to live in Britain. Mahmood may well succeed in tightening the official rules. But unless she can close the gap between the hundreds of thousands arriving and the tens of thousands leaving, Britain’s asylum system will function less as a shield for the vulnerable and more as a waiting room for the determined.