Smashing the Gangs, Missing the Point: UK Asylum Policy Reform Revisited

Two Years of ‘Smash the Gangs’

This week, Shabana Mahmood set out planned reforms to the asylum system. The Home Secretary’s announcement comes amid ongoing concern over small-boat migration, despite two years of ‘smash-the-gangs’ oriented enforcement. Under this campaign-pledge turned policy, the government has spent hundreds of millions of pounds on its flagship Border Security Command (BSC). Alongside this, the UK developed its first organised crime-specific targeted financial sanctions regime, rolling out the Global Irregular Migration sanctions regime in July 2025. All the while, immigration crime has risen steadily up the National Crime Agency’s (NCA) priority list, overtaking drugs investigations atop the Agency’s workload league table.

The increased funding and attention paid to smashing the smuggling gangs has yielded some results. According to government figures, immigration enforcement, by 2026, reached ‘the highest level in UK history’. Official figures for 2025 point to over 17,400 raids on illegal working-linked businesses, an 83% rise in illegal working arrests, over 600 boats and engines seized, a 33% increase in immigration crime disruptions – and some 38,000 returns. In all, the operational picture is rather clear: the immigration crime focus has yielded tangible and visible results in more cases than before.

And yet, the strategic picture is considerably less clear. Channel crossings have persisted. In 2025, the first full year following the new Government’s smash-the-gangs policy focus, there were 41,472 irregular arrivals – the second most all-time. As of June 2026, the year-over-year figures reflect a 13% decrease in irregular arrivals, similar to the comparable period in 2022 – albeit with the channel-crossing intensive months still ahead.

Moreover, as enforcement pressures grow, smugglers and traffickers have resorted to higher risk measures. Criminal adaptation has sustained a lethal trend of overcrowding dinghies sent across the channel. In 2018, there were 7 migrants per boat. As of March 2026, the figure stands at 63 per boat. The overcrowding is not a random – it’s part of the ‘industrialisation’ of cross-channel migrant smuggling. Not unlike low-cost airlines, smugglers have adapted to meet market demands, offering increasingly lower cost options for migrant crossings despite increased enforcement pressure.

In sum, the question of what will stop the boats remains elusive. According to some officials in the space, there’s a damning and partially tongue-in-cheek answer: only the weather stops the boats – and the rain never lasts. Experts, on the other hand, have long pointed to safe and legal pathways, timely processing and wider asylum system reform.

The New and the Plainly Political

Concern over continued arrivals has remained high, and public polling shows dissatisfaction in the government’s handling of immigration and asylum policy – while remaining broadly supportive of accepting refugees. It is amid this charged situation that the Home Secretary has unveiled new asylum system reforms.

These have also been seen as an attempt to assuage increasingly vocal segments of the Labour party. The new policy is by no means an admission of the strategic challenges faced in the government’s efforts to stop the boats. However, it does signal a long-overdue intention to grapple with a chronic policy challenge.

Systems designed to support and integrate asylum seekers are proposed in the creation of a ‘community sponsorship scheme', empowering communities to sponsor local refugee settlement. Under this plan, universities will similarly be able to sponsor refugees. According to the government, the plan is largely influenced by the successful Canadian measures and the UK’s own Homes for Ukraine scheme, in which some 270,000 Ukrainians were granted refuge in the UK since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. This move is significant, as it represents a fresh attempt to engage with safe and legal routes for asylum seekers. Sponsorship into communities, if sufficiently resourced and systematised, could reduce reliance on the politically toxic hotels costing the UK £2.1 billion annually. However, the scale at which these schemes will be operated remains unknown. Should the scheme be similar in scale to the UK-France ‘one in, one out’ deal – which has only seen 606 migrants transferred to France – then the scheme will represent nothing more than political signalling.

Furthermore, contained within the Home Office plans are efforts to limit the definition of who qualifies for asylum – primarily through restricting the definition of ‘family’ through revision of the UK’s interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights’ (ECHR) Article 8. The revision is likely the preferred alternative and an attempt to prevent wholesale exit from the ECHR – as advocated by the Conservatives and Reform. The new legal text proposed by the Government would restrict family to the immediate nuclear family (parents, children, siblings). This move aims to reduce total figures but may also expedite asylum claim processing times. The Government has significantly reduced processing times since taking office, with the backlog of ‘asylum cases awaiting initial decision’ reduced by 73% from 2023 to present, but this may be directly linked to a surge in appeals of those initially denied. While legal clarity in this regard may reduce the backlog – but introduces novel risks around wrongful rejections in complex cases. Furthermore, as noted by the UNHCR, the UK’s under-funded asylum claims process compounds delays, owing to a lack of legal aid, insufficient qualified judges and other issues. Failure to streamline and secure the integrity of the processing and appeals process threatens to bloat wait times – and with it, continued reliance on spiralling hotel costs, extended waiting times and the associated political toxicity.

Other policies are more valuable as headlines than as immigration crime control strategies. Chief among which is the requirement for payment by asylum seekers to cover government costs, dominating the coverage on the Home Secretary’s reforms. The policy seeks to charge ‘means-tested’ asylum seekers £10,000 to cover the expenses associated with accommodation and subsistence in the UK. This policy – a direct response to the debate over ‘migrant hotels’ – introduces an acute risk of policy fratricide within a Home Office concerned with migration, illegal working and organised crime. Migration and asylum loopholes and incentive structures are already inextricably linked to the rise of undocumented workers found operating in ‘dodgy shops’ across Britain’s high streets. Now, forcing vulnerable populations to potentially self-raise £10,000 presents many asylum seekers two options: find access to informal financing or obtain a job at any cost – which they are currently legally prohibited from doing. Put simply: find a loan shark, work illegally or recruitment into crime.

Saving the Asylum System?

The Home Secretary has high hopes for the announced changes, self-assessing: ‘my reforms will save the asylum system for a generation’. The introduction of a community sponsorship model and an ill-conceived requirement for some refugees to self-fund are far from revolutionary. In fact, strikingly similar policies have been announced before by previous and current governments. In fact, many of these policy ideas were announced in a November 2025 policy paper, under the current Home Secretary, outlining punitive measures such as 20-year wait for settlement and the use of asset seizure to pay against asylum support costs. However, as noted by IPPR’s Marley Morris, the deterrence and punitive policies are neither novel nor empirically supported: ‘the UK has now passed successive legislation signalling a tougher approach to asylum and irregular immigration . . . yet the boats keep coming’. Echoing those sentiments of law enforcement and border officials who credit only the weather with reduced crossings, Morris concludes, ‘it therefore seems implausible that these new measures will make a meaningful difference’.

As small boat and irregular arrivals continue largely unabated; criminal groups relentlessly profit and adapt; backlogs plaguing the system endure and the debate over UK asylum policy grows more toxic, it is vital to pay close attention to those bottlenecks and opportunities with genuine capacity to ‘save’ the asylum system. There are two immediate opportunities for the Home Secretary: setting out a meaningful approach to targeting the entirety of the backlog (not just initial decisions) and rapidly and sustainably scaling the community sponsorship scheme.

First, addressing the full breadth of the crippling backlog must be a priority. Admittedly, a cry to ‘end the backlog’ is neither politically exciting nor a particularly attractive political slogan. However, experts are in agreement that the ‘devil is in the detail’ when it comes to fixing the asylum system. Fortunately, the government has already made positive progress in reducing total pending applications and processing times. In this case, addressing the backlog – both at the initial decision and in the subsequent appeals process. This requires attention paid to improving the quality of statement gathering, processing and legal aid, rather than hyper-focus on streamlining and expediting decisions. Deliberate focus at early stages can prevent costly delays, appeals and complications later.

Second, scaling safe and legal pathways is vital to reducing small boat arrivals and reducing migrants’ reliance on ruthless smugglers and traffickers. Enduring demand to claim asylum in the UK, paired with limited legal means to apply, entirely relinquishes control over irregular migration to organised crime – with the UK left playing ill-fated catch-up. Safe and legal routes are the means by which asylum seekers can be displaced from the criminal market, into the oversight of the government. To date, those few policies encouraged or met with optimism by experts in this area have been deployed at scales bordering on irrelevant. Effectively reducing organised crime’s effective monopoly requires safe, legal alternative to be deployed at scale. Achieving this requires resource, long-term planning and particular attention to the learnings from the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

Finally, the addition of a £10,000 repayment into the asylum model is a concerning direction of travel and must be immediately questioned for both its ethics and potential to force people into underground, criminal activity solely in order to comply. Failure to consider the negative unintended consequences of ineffective, punitive and deterrence-oriented policies will result in tangible harm to both migrants and UK communities.

© RUSI, 2026.

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