Keir Starmer’s plans to tighten asylum legal guidelines to finish ‘golden ticket to settling within the UK’ are branded ‘one other gimmick’ and ‘tinkering on the edges’
Proposals from Labour to tighten asylum laws were branded ‘tinkering at the edges’ on Wednesday night.
Refugees will lose the automatic right to settle in Britain for life, under plans to be set out on Thursday.
Current rules which mean most granted asylum are automatically entitled to apply for ‘indefinite leave to remain’ after five years are to be ended.
In addition, refugees’ rights to bring relatives here are unlikely to be restored after they were temporarily halted this summer.
Downing Street said the changes, to be announced by Sir Keir Starmer at the European Political Community summit in Copenhagen, will reduce the ‘pull factors’ drawing migrants across the Channel.
A Government source said Britain’s current asylum system is ‘overly generous’.
The proposals are intended to stop migrants gaming the system and ‘asylum shopping’ for the best deal by making claims in multiple European countries, the source added.
The measures will strip refugees’ rights down to the ‘core protections’ which are required under international conventions, it was claimed. Sir Keir said last night: ‘There will be no golden ticket to settling in the UK. People will have to earn it.’
Refugees will lose the automatic right to settle in Britain for life, under plans to be set out on Thursday (file photo of migrants crossing the Channel in a small boat)
Downing Street said the changes, to be announced by Sir Keir Starmer (pictured at the Labour conference), will reduce the ‘pull factors’ drawing migrants across the Channel
He also pledged to ‘look again’ at how the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is used in asylum cases.
The Prime Minister also indicated an ongoing Home Office review of Article 8, the right to private and family life, and Article 3, which prohibits torture and ill-treatment, could lead to the narrowing of their use in cases brought by asylum seekers.
But Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘It’s tinkering at the edges.
‘This is another gimmick from a Government that has lost control of our borders.’
And a major new report warned the ‘most effective’ way to overcome problems with the ECHR would be to leave it altogether.
The study – by leading lawyers Professor Richard Ekins KC and Sir Stephen Laws KC, published by think-tank Policy Exchange – said the UK should persuade other signatories to make significant reforms to the treaty.
If that proved impossible Britain should leave, it added.
In the meantime, the Government should ‘adopt a practice of principled defiance’ against the European Court of Human Rights which oversees the treaty.
