Shabana Mahmood to reopen UK refugee resettlement scheme with annual cap

Shabana Mahmood is set to announce the immediate reopening of the UK Resettlement Scheme, giving some vulnerable refugees a route to Britain after it stopped taking new referrals in December 2024. The Home Office expects arrivals to begin in the hundreds, but has not announced the annual cap that will determine the scheme’s scale.

The home secretary is due to set out the policy at the Labour Party conference on Monday, 28 September. Officials expect Afghan women and girls and Palestinians to make up about 25% of arrivals. That is a forecast, not a guaranteed allocation; the reports provide neither a total number of places nor a timeframe for that share.

Who could come through the scheme

According to the Guardian, the reopened route will also give priority to people with disabilities and vulnerable women and girls. It reports that family units can come together under the scheme, while extended families cannot. The detailed eligibility rules have not yet been set out in the available reports, so the priority groups should not be read as an exhaustive list of those who may qualify.

The Guardian says prospective refugees will be identified by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and the International Refugee Assistance Project. The Home Office says they will face security and criminality checks. Those admitted through the route are expected to have a five-year path to indefinite leave to remain, according to both the BBC and the Guardian.

How many places are planned

Home Office sources expect the initial number of arrivals to be in the hundreds and say it could grow to the low thousands as levels of illegal migration fall. An annual cap will apply, but no figure has been published. Those projections therefore do not establish how many people will be admitted in any particular year, or how quickly the scheme might expand.

The scale matters when comparing the proposal with the UK’s existing routes. Home Office statistics recorded 7,445 people resettled across resettlement and relocation schemes in the year ending June 2025. That figure covers several programmes, not just the UK Resettlement Scheme. It is an older baseline and does not measure arrivals under the newly reopened route.

Within that total, 872 people arrived through the UK Resettlement Scheme and the Mandate Scheme combined, including community sponsorship, while 6,573 arrived through the Afghan Resettlement Programme. The Home Office said the UK Resettlement Scheme had resettled 4,112 refugees since its 2021 launch by June 2025. Those totals predate Monday’s announcement and should not be treated as a forecast for the new intake.

The debate over Channel crossings

Mahmood is expected to present the reopening as a way to help people fleeing war and persecution while keeping admissions capped and controlled. The government also hopes that offering safe and legal routes will deter small-boat crossings. That is a stated policy aim: the reopening has not yet produced evidence that it will reduce such journeys.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, told the Guardian that the route’s impact would depend on the number of people admitted. She said there was no reason to believe resettlement would have a large effect on unauthorised arrivals. Her assessment draws a distinction between offering protection to selected refugees and changing the incentives facing people considering an irregular journey.

Refugee Council chief policy analyst Jon Featonby welcomed new safe routes but said they must operate at scale to make a difference. He called for thousands of places rather than hundreds. Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp opposed the move, saying the UK should admit no more migrants or asylum seekers until illegal immigration had fallen close to zero. The government has not supplied an annual cap against which either response can yet be tested.

Other routes and next steps

The Guardian reports that applications for community and university sponsorship are due to open in October 2026, with the first arrivals expected by autumn 2027. Applications for a separate work sponsorship route are expected to open in spring 2027. Those routes sit alongside the reopened UK Resettlement Scheme; their future arrivals should not be mistaken for places already allocated under it.

For now, the immediate change is the planned resumption of referrals to the UK Resettlement Scheme. The number of places under its annual cap, fuller eligibility rules and the timetable for arrivals remain to be established. The Home Office’s estimate that Afghan women and girls and Palestinians will account for roughly a quarter of arrivals will also depend on the eventual size and operation of the scheme.