Farage proposes five-year asylum shutdown and mass deportations

• Reform UK says it would stop granting asylum for up to five years, reject new claims and void pending cases.
• The roughly 90,000 figure often cited is the number of outstanding asylum appeal cases, not people waiting for an initial decision.
• People granted asylum since 2024 could have their status reviewed; Ukrainians would be exempt from the proposed closure of resettlement routes.
• Reform says it would use visa bans, flight restrictions, threats to assets and, as a last resort, tariffs to press countries to accept deportees.

Nigel Farage has proposed shutting down the UK asylum system for up to five years, rejecting new claims and voiding cases already in progress. At a Reform UK press conference in Kent on Monday, he said a Reform government would also deport people whose claims were rejected.¹²

This is a party proposal, not a change to current government policy. Reform says it would need to change domestic law and leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act and disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention to remove legal barriers to its plan.³

The scale of the cases potentially affected is not settled in the announcement. The figure of about 90,000 refers to asylum appeals outstanding at the end of June 2026, according to the Home Office. It is not a count of people awaiting their first decision: that group numbered 40,168 people, linked to 32,401 cases.⁴⁵

The proposal would reach beyond new and pending claims. Reform says it would review asylum grants made since 2024; people from countries the Home Secretary deemed safe could lose permission to stay. It also proposes ending legal resettlement routes, with an exception for schemes set up for Ukrainians after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.²

For deportations, Farage named home countries as destinations and said some people could be sent to a safe third country. Reform home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf referred to unspecified third-country options for “edge cases”. Neither the announcement nor the reporting on it names a network of receiving countries or sets out agreements to take deportees back.¹²

Instead, Farage said Reform would pressure countries that refused returns with visa bans, flight bans and threats to assets held in Britain; he said tariffs could be used “in extremis”. Yusuf’s estimate that the party could deport more than one million people includes foreign criminals and others Reform says have no right to be in the UK. It is not a count of people covered by the asylum suspension.²

The practical obstacle is that removals depend on destination countries accepting people. Refugee organisations have called the proposal unworkable and warned that closing the system would leave people seeking protection vulnerable. Those are their assessments; the proposal has not been tested in court.⁶

Footnotes

1. Reform UK, “Reform UK will end the asylum scam”, 12 October 2026 ↩ ↩²

2. ITV News, “Reform would threaten foreign assets in asylum crackdown, says Farage”, 12 October 2026 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Reform UK, edited extract of Nigel Farage’s speech, 12 October 2026 ↩

4. Home Office, “Immigration and Asylum Bill: Independent Immigration Appeals Authority”, 8 October 2026 ↩

5. Home Office, “How many people are in the UK asylum system?”, 27 August 2026 ↩

6. The Independent, “Farage accused of ‘dangerous dog whistle’ with ‘profoundly un-British’ asylum crackdown”, 12 October 2026 ↩