Here we go again. Another Immigration and Asylum Bill shuffles into the Commons for its second reading today. Introduced on 30 June, sponsored by Shabana Mahmood, it promises to tweak asylum rules, refugee status and modern slavery measures. Sounds familiar. How many of these have we sat through while small boats keep landing and hotels fill up with claimants?
The bill replaces refugee status and humanitarian protection with one single protection status. It sets up new Immigration and Asylum Appeals Adjudicators to handle first-instance appeals instead of proper judges. It makes it harder to wave Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights like a get-out-of-deportation card. The Home Secretary can now chase people for the cost of their support. On modern slavery it amends the 2015 Act and 2022 Borders Act with prevention orders, changes to the National Referral Mechanism and tougher transparency rules for supply chains, complete with big fines for non-compliance.
All of it flows from the government's November 2025 paper on restoring order and control. Incremental tweaks, they call it. The public calls it kicking the can down the road while their towns change beyond recognition.
Ordinary families in Birmingham, Leeds and coastal villages watch their streets, schools and GP surgeries buckle under numbers no one planned for. They pay the taxes that fund this mess. They get told to be patient.
Does this bill stop the boats? No. Does it set an annual cap on arrivals? No. Does it scrap the pull factors that make Britain the destination of choice? Not even close. It fiddles with appeals and human rights arguments that lawyers will still exploit for years. It adds layers of bureaucracy that will clog the system further. And on modern slavery, it brings in penalties up to a million pounds or more for companies that treat reporting as a rubber stamp.
Lord Alton of Liverpool welcomed parts of that. As chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights he said the expanded reporting requirements and new penalties would force businesses and public bodies to take their duties seriously. He argued the public deserve confidence that goods and services aren't produced at terrible human cost. Fair point on slavery. But it doesn't touch the core failure: uncontrolled illegal immigration that swamps services and breeds resentment.
