BFAWU Executive Council responds to the Home Secretary’s statement.

The BFAWU Executive Council is alarmed by the Home Secretary’s announcement yesterday, and by the direction it signals for the UK’s asylum system. The government’s statement that refugee status will become temporary, that the pathway to settlement will be significantly lengthened, and that support for people seeking safety may be withdrawn raises profound concerns about fairness, human rights, and the functioning of our economy.

In her statement, Shabana Mahmood said the current system is “out of control” and that the UK must move to a “core protection” regime where leave to remain is reduced (from five years to around 30 months) and where permanent settlement will only be available after a much longer period (potentially up to 20 years). She also proposed removing the automatic duty to provide accommodation and financial support for some asylum seekers, particularly those who can work but choose not to, or who break rules.

We welcome the government’s stated aim of reducing exploitation and safeguarding decent work but we strongly reject the notion that migrating workers, including those who arrived as asylum seekers, are a “problem” to be solved by shrinking their rights and pushing them into precarity.

We make the following points:
• The food industry like many other sectors relies heavily on migrant labour, including people who first came as asylum seekers. Without them, production, processing, distribution and retail would face serious disruption.
• Many of our members are migrant workers. They perform essential roles, pay taxes, and contribute to our communities. To treat them as disposable, or condition their status on arbitrary deadlines and support-withdrawal, is both morally wrong and economically unsound.
• The Home Secretary’s statement that refugee status will be temporary, subject to review, and that home countries will be deemed “safe” for return after short periods without guaranteeing genuine safety or protection is deeply troubling from a human-rights standpoint.
• We deplore the language of “illegal migration” used to sweepingly characterise people seeking safety. As the BFAWU has consistently said: there is no such thing as an “illegal person” only a status which the state determines.
• The risk is that these reforms will create a two-tier workforce: people with insecure status who are vulnerable to exploitation, fear of deportation, and denial of rights. This undermines the fight for decent work, proper pay and safe conditions that unions champion.
• From a union and broader labour movement perspective, the focus must be on rights, dignity and stability, not on temporary, conditional entitlements that can be removed on a whim.

We call on the government to:
1. Recognise the real contribution of migrant workers a number of whom arrived as asylum seekers to the UK economy and to sectors such as food production and allied industries.
2. Refrain from reducing protections or creating instability in workers’ rights in the name of migration control.
3. Guarantee that those granted asylum or protection are treated with dignity, given secure status and rights comparable to other workers not condemned to limbo or fear.
4. Prioritise enforcement against labour exploitation rather than penalising people exercising the human right to seek safety.
5. Adopt immigration and asylum policies rooted in solidarity, human rights and economic realism not in rhetoric that undermines workers, divides communities and endangers the dignity of working people.

The BFAWU stands with our migrant members; we stand for the principle that everyone who works here, who contributes here, deserves to be treated with respect and given secure rights. We reject any policy that says “you are welcome” but only temporarily, under threat, or only if you can meet ever-shifting conditions.

BFAWU Executive Council