Joe Tetlow: This is how we should reform Government to improve the immigration system

Joe Tetlow is an Associate Fellow at Bright Blue and former Special Adviser to the Home Secretary

As a former Home Office special adviser, I have been asked to shed some light on how we might improve the immigration system. My time at 2 Marsham Street was relatively short, but busy; advising on small boat crossings, the Rwanda Act, asylum accommodation and big changes to the visa rules which are now cutting net migration. I will try to provide some reflections into the state of play under the bonnet at one of our Great Offices of State – and offer some advice for the new Labour administration on what policies they might pursue.

First, the context: annual net migration to the UK hit an historic high of 906,000 in 2023 before falling by 20 per cent in 2024. Fortunately for the new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, they have inherited a set of visa reforms introduced by former Conservative home secretary James Cleverly, which are already cutting inward migration significantly. These reforms included banning social care workers and most international students from bringing dependants to the UK, as well as raising the minimum annual salary for Skilled Worker visas from £26,200 to £38,700 – and the spousal visa to £29,000.

The early signs are promising. There were 46,500 applications for dependants on the Health and Care route between April 2024 to January 2025 – 77 per cent fewer than the same 10 months between April 2023 and January 2024. And there were 21,500 applications from dependants of students in the year ending January 2025, 84 per cent fewer than in the year ending January 2024.

As a result, we can expect a further fall in net migration this year. During this Parliament, without any additional visa measures, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Office for National Statistics (ONS), and the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) all think net migration should settle at between 300,000-350,000, less than half what it is now – and back to pre-pandemic levels. Labour should capitalise on this, but they should also not rest on their laurels.

Improvements, particularly to how the government machine records and transmits data to ministers, should be a priority. The publication of monthly visa data has helped provide faster information flows to ministers, but these datasets should go much further still, accounting for the sponsor institution (be it a university, social care provider, or kebab house sponsoring the visa), as well as the local authority area, so that ministers have all the information to spot issues quickly.

Ministers should also consider asking for the current monthly data to extend beyond the reformed areas (skilled worker, family, study and dependent visas) to include regular tracking of ‘all visas issued’, such as graduate and visitor visas (including regular reports on overstays), as well as grants of citizenship. The recent revocation of Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) permission for Trinidad and Tobago, from where visa overstays and asylum claims have spiked, is a good example of data helping ministers make fast decisions. This should be the rule, not the exception.

I would also like to see reform to ‘impact assessments’, the dense policy documents that are supposed to provide comprehensive analysis of the potential impacts of a policy or regulation, but which are often full of wild assumptions, outdated or politically motivated statistics and even selective polling. They are not fit for purpose – and the government should order a review into how they can be improved. At the very least, they need to be shorter, clearer, and given to ministers earlier to interrogate.

More broadly, a close eye needs to be kept on chain migration, the phenomenon where family members of existing migrants and people from the same area follow them to the host country. To address this, proposals to increase the time before which migrants can apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain from five to ten years (as the Netherlands and now the Conservative opposition in the UK are proposing) should be given careful consideration.

Labour ministers now have the tools at their disposal to cut or raise migration via secondary legislation and, outside the EU, will have nobody to blame but themselves if net migration ticks back up. As they approach the first year in government, and with an upcoming Immigration White Paper, it is no longer plausible for Labour to blame its inheritance; it must instead focus on the reforms it wants to see.

The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill is, I am afraid, only a distraction to ministers and senior officials within the Home Office; more about tough rhetoric than about tough action. Repealing the Rwanda deterrent and re-legislating for domestic arrest powers that largely already exist will not stop boats launching from France. Neither will an expensive new Border Security Command. But investment in drone technology, intelligence, and personnel to help the French police prevent launches, as well as to provide clearer evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service to put small boat pilots in jail, will make a difference. Alongside further investment in the National Crime Agency, Immigration Enforcement, and detention capacity, Labour can make progress.

The recent returns deal with Iraq, set in train by the previous government, was a big success. The question for Labour is whether it can get sufficient further returns deals – along with greater co-operation with countries from whom we receive the most failed asylum seekers. Poor returns records to countries like Turkey and India need to be resolved and visa restrictions should be applied until that is the case. The way US President Donald Trump has used tariff policy to secure returns deals should be a lesson to an overly cautious Whitehall.

As for those who fail the UK asylum system but cannot be removed to their home country, Labour does still have a binding treaty under which failed asylum seekers, including the four volunteers currently in Rwanda, can be relocated. Although politically difficult and legally untested for failed asylum seekers, it should not be ruled out.

Whilst the Rwanda volunteers have been ridiculed, the concept of voluntary returns should not be. They are a bigger share of the returns numbers than enforced returns. Paying people more to return than the £3,000 currently handed out might be an easy way to drive up returns and save money on hotels and legal fees. From next year, Sweden will offer ten times the amount the UK does for voluntary returns, which should act as some political cover and context.

Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, has recently questioned whether mass deportations are possible – and is right to do so for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is there are only around 2,200 beds for failed asylum seekers and foreign national offenders combined, which is nowhere near enough and leaves far too many foreign national offenders in the community.

The biggest fear for Labour ministers now will be that an asylum seeker, failed asylum seeker, or foreign national offender commits a horrific crime – like Abdul Ezedi’s acid attack – and the Home Office is viewed as incompetent, impotent, or both. The move to tag dangerous foreign criminals is an important interim measure, but having the absolute capability to remove dangerous criminals and failed asylum seekers with no right to be here must be the ultimate priority.

Finally, Labour has pledged to end the use of asylum hotels but has not set out how or by when. Increasing the volume of dispersed accommodation and maximising beds within them will help. Processing asylum claims more quickly will also help, but until the court backlog is solved, those who appeal a negative asylum decision will continue to wait in taxpayer-funded accommodation for far too long – often longer than a year – whilst denied the right to work.

Perversely, because it is faster, the Home Office now has a financial incentive to grant protection to asylum seekers, because they are then moved onto local authority waiting lists, instead of awaiting their appeal while housed in Home Office accommodation.

As caseworkers are asked to clear the asylum backlog, they will likely be using something called ‘Streamlined Asylum Processing’ (SAP), which essentially means speeding up claims by processing them without a substantive interview. When SAP was stopped previously, the asylum grant rate fell, so if they are using it again now, we are likely to see the grant rate temporarily go back up again.

This may save on immediate costs, but in the long term, hiring, training, and retaining more caseworkers is the best way to sustainably speed up the processing system without undermining standards or creating perverse outcomes. The other cost-cutting option which will reduce hotel use is to let more asylum seekers work and support themselves. The current 12-month ban is higher than many comparable countries.

There is plenty more the government should get on and do. The National Crime Agency is still relatively new (set up in 2013) but has the potential to be the FBI of the UK, with better and more frequent communications to inform the public of its often great but underreported work, including on immigration crime. Digital government ID is needed for so many reasons, not least to account properly for the number of people in the country, but also to clamp down on illegal working, as well as NHS and benefit fraud.

The UK should also help to lead international reform to update asylum frameworks around the ‘first safe country’ principle with aid ring-fenced to those countries – and increased safe and legal routes considered multilaterally. The contradiction at the heart of the UK’s asylum framework is (unless you are eligible for a resettlement scheme, such as the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme) you must be in the UK to claim asylum – all the while the UK pours money into preventing you from getting here. The UK should lead sensible reform or pull out.

The Home Office is certainly unrelenting, but, like any department, it relies on good ministers, able advisers, committed senior civil servants, functioning systems and a bit of luck. Labour failed to include immigration in its recent Plan for Change, but perhaps, away from the spotlight, this is an area of government policy that has the potential to undergo more rapid and impactful change than any other.