The architecture of futility
The government’s sweeping asylum reforms promise order, control and public reassurance. What they deliver instead is a system built on precarity, theatrical severity and the deliberate neglect of evidence – a blueprint that deepens chaos while claiming to solve it.
There is a certain kind of politics that mistakes severity for competence. It appears whenever a government finds itself cornered – by rising anxiety, by falling approval, by years of administrative decay – and concludes that the only way out is to turn the screws harder. Not to understand the problem, not to repair the machinery, but to demonstrate that something decisive is being done. Britain’s latest overhaul of the asylum system belongs firmly in this category: sweeping, punitive, self-assured, and curiously detached from evidence of what actually works.
The Home Secretary’s plan arrives wrapped in rhetoric about ‘restoring order,’ ‘ending abuse,’ and ‘bringing the public back onside.’ But when you examine the proposals closely – very closely – you encounter something stranger: a set of reforms that do little to address the drivers of irregular migration, nothing to deter smugglers, nothing to reduce taxpayer costs, and even less to improve the asylum system. Instead, they seem engineered to project discipline while manufacturing disorder.
That is not a matter of ideological distaste. It is simply reading the evidence the government already possesses – much of it commissioned by the previous government and then quietly buried when the results proved inconvenient.
In 2020, the Home Office produced a comparative international review on asylum drivers, the impact of border measures, and the reasons people make dangerous journeys. That document, quietly released with no press briefing at all, draws a series of blunt conclusions: restrictive asylum policies do not reduce arrivals; harsh deterrence pushes people into more dangerous routes; people smugglers thrive when safe routes close; and asylum seekers rarely know or care about welfare entitlements in destination states. The factors that shape movements are almost always conflict, persecution, diaspora networks, and simple geography. The new reforms ignore all of this.
This is awkward because the government’s entire overhaul is premised on the opposite.
The new plan reconfigures refugee status into something temporary, contingent, and revocable. Under the proposals, refugees will be placed on a temporary protection model, with status renewed every thirty months and no automatic path to settlement until up to twenty years have passed. And this does not apply solely to new arrivals: it is retrospective. People who were months away from obtaining settlement after five years of residence will now face a fifteen-twenty-year process. The Refugee Council estimates that carrying out these retrospective assessments will cost taxpayers at least £1.3 million annually, and that the administrative burden will worsen delays in an already overwhelmed system.
This would be one thing if the purpose were evidentially sound. But temporary protection is rarely efficient, and it is never stabilising. People work, people learn English, enrol their children, volunteer, integrate – and then receive a letter informing them that the clock has reset, and they are once again pending judgment. A system designed to produce precarity cannot reasonably claim to be restoring public confidence. It can only produce more churn, more bureaucracy and more cost.
It is a peculiar logic: destabilise people to make them integrate; threaten their status to make them stay; create insecurity and call it control.
Another striking element is the insistence that asylum support is a form of indulgence. One of the headline announcements – delivered with the tone of someone unveiling a breakthrough discovery – is that asylum support is ‘free’. Of course it is. The right to seek asylum, and the corresponding duty of states to prevent destitution while claims are assessed, has been a cornerstone of international protection since 1951. To speak of support as if it were a loophole is to misunderstand the basic architecture of the system.
More significantly, the government plans to repeal the statutory duty to provide accommodation and basic financial support to all asylum seekers. Support will be withdrawn from those deemed able to work, or who have breached rules, or who have committed ‘offences’ – a category the Home Office has not yet clearly defined.
The government also intends to end automatic family reunion. The justification offered is startling: some parents, it is claimed, may be sending their children to Britain to ‘take advantage of UK laws.’ Beyond the moral contortions required to imagine families risking their children’s lives in the Channel for the sake of welfare payments, the plan clashes head-on with the Children Act 1989, the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009, and the fundamental principle that the state must safeguard children within its jurisdiction.
The Home Office says it will ‘consult’ on how to enforce removals of families with children. It has not clarified whether it intends to override existing child-protection statutes. But one thing is clear: any attempt to deport children will be challenged in the courts, and likely at Strasbourg, delaying implementation of other measures the government claims are urgent.
In short, the plan designed to deliver speed is built on foundations that guarantee delay.
Perhaps the most politically revealing note concerns the redefinition to the right to family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Home Secretary says she will narrow to definition of ‘family’ to parents and children only, and revise the public interest so that the ‘default’ becomes removal with Article 8 applying only in ‘exceptional circumstances.’
This is remarkable for two reasons:
First, because it admits – quietly – that much of the system’s dysfunction stems not from the ECHR but from domestic law, domestic backlog, and domestic administrative failure.
Second, Article 8 is not a vague concept that the government can reshape at will. It is a binding human right grounded in constitutional limits – because the UK’s uncodified constitution, human rights law (including Convention rights) functions as a constitutional constraint on state power. So yes, narrowing Article 8 is an attempt to push past constitutional limits.
And yet, even here, the practical question remains: what does any of this do to stop smugglers? What does it do to reduce irregular arrivals? What does it do to make the system workable?
Nothing.
“It is a peculiar logic: destabilise people to make them integrate; threaten their status to make them stay; create insecurity and call it control. ”
Closing safe routes strengthens smuggling markets. Creating uncertainty undermines integration. Increasing bureaucracy increases cost. These are not political positions; they are empirical findings, drawn from the previous government’s research.
Common Weal often talks about state capability: the quiet work of building systems that are predictable, competent, humane, and effective. This asylum overhaul is the opposite of that. It is a catalogue of measures that create uncertainty, escalate complexity, and expand the administrative burden without addressing the structural drivers of irregular migration.
What is increasingly clear is that these reforms are not designed to fix the system, but to signal something. The threat of Reform UK looms; the Labour government is eager to look ‘serious’; the Home Secretary tells us that public consent is collapsing because people feel migration was “done to them.” But rather than build capacity, improve decisions, or engage communities, the government turns to theatrical severity.
The government continues to insist this is the price of restoring control.
But control of what? Control of borders or control of the narrative? Control of outcomes or control of appearance?
This is the fundamental question that splits symbolic policy from serious governance: does the measure solve the problem it names?
Nothing in the package addresses the central drivers of irregular migration. Nothing in it creates safe, managed alternatives. Nothing in it reduces the power of smuggling networks. Nothing in it streamlines casework capacity. Nothing in it aligns with the government’s own evidence base.
What it does do – deliberately – is create distance between government and the far right by adopting the far right’s vocabulary without acknowledging it. It draws sharp lines around respectability, signalling toughness while leaving the underlying system even more fragile.
This is not the architecture of a solution.
It is the architecture of futility – elaborate, expensive, and built to collapse.
A serious asylum system would do the opposite.
It would create two clear pathways:
A legitimate economic migration route, where contribution is the logic;
A protection pathway, where safety is the point.
It would prioritise fast, high-quality decisions, not perpetual reviews. It would provide stability so people can integrate and contribute. It would open safe, limited legal routes to undercut smugglers. It would conduct credible security checks at arrival points. It would be honest with the public: asylum flows rise and fall with global crises, not with welfare entitlements or Article 8 rights.
Most of all, it would treat the asylum system as a public institution to be managed – not a stage on which to prove one’s toughness.
Britain does not need harsher laws. It needs capacity, clarity, and competence.
A government capable of reading past evidence.
A government willing to do the unglamorous work of statecraft.
Until then, the public will continue to feel migration is ‘done to them’ – not because of asylum seekers, but because policy is being shaped by fear and optics rather than understanding and evidence.
The tragedy is not that the government does not know what works. It is that it knows – and chooses not to do it.
