The Refugee Council’s Imran Hussain condemned the plans for those who had travelled to the UK illegally or by small boat and do not work or study to wait 30 years for indefinite leave to remain as “unfair and unworkable”.
He said the plans would “condemn refugees to decades of deep insecurity” and “create another bureaucratic nightmare” for the Home Office.
“There is no evidence to suggest that harming refugee integration will act as a disincentive to refugees fleeing the Taliban or brutal conflicts like Sudan,” he said.
“The fairest reforms would be making fast and good quality asylum decisions, with those refugees granted protection being helped to rebuild their lives and to contribute, and those with no right to remain helped to leave with dignity.”
For the Conservatives, shadow home secretary Chris Philp said: “It took a year for the home secretary to build her reputation as tough on immigration.
“But what took a year to build, she has just dismantled in 12 short minutes.”
Philp said opposition from fellow ministers and the “Labour open borders left” had resulted in the changes, adding Mahmood was “no longer running the government’s immigration policy”.
He highlighted figures from March in which Home Office calculations suggested 196,000 care workers and their adult dependants could settle between 2026 and 2030, at an estimated lifetime cost of £9.5bn to taxpayers.
Philp said this was the “cost of today’s U-turn”.
But Father of the House Sir Edward Leigh, the longest-serving male MP in the Commons, criticised his Conservative colleague for overseeing the so-called Boriswave after Brexit, where net migration peaked at nearly one million in 2023.
“Some of us don’t have amnesia,” he said. “Many of us in that period in 2023 were putting this to our then government and anybody who was serving as a Home Office minister in that period should wear sackcloth and ashes, and frankly we will never move on until we accept that.”
Philp was a Home Office minister from 2022 to 2024, a period when the government relaxed immigration rules to introduce a post-Brexit Australian-style points-based system and welcomed an influx of non-EU migrants.