A five-year halt on approving asylum applications formed the centrepiece of the policy platform that Reform UK's leader put forward, contingent on the party winning office. Plans put forward by Farage would halt the processing of asylum requests for the entirety of a parliamentary term, with any applications already under way rendered null.
Under these plans, asylum tribunals, legally established refugee routes, and formal resettlement schemes would all be dismantled. Under a Reform administration, the approximately 90,000 pending asylum and humanitarian protection appeals would be set aside, with those who brought them facing removal from the country instead.
The party's draft proposals identified six nations — Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Afghanistan, and Sudan — as targets for visa restrictions, with the selection grounded in the scale of their existing diaspora communities in the UK. The same measures would have closed off resettlement routes that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood had recently moved to restore, routes under which Palestinians and Afghan women and girls together accounted for roughly one in four of the available places.
Reform contended that the schemes in question lacked any democratic mandate and that those who had arrived through them would be removed from the country. People who received asylum protection within the past five years could find their cases brought back before the Home Office for fresh examination under the proposed measures.
Speaking to a prominent news outlet, Farage put forward the view that the country faces a national security emergency and that protecting citizens stands as the primary obligation of any government. Proponents of stricter border controls have argued that admitting additional asylum seekers should be paused until authorities can establish more reliable figures on undocumented residents and assess any associated public-safety considerations.
The announcement came after plans set out earlier in the year to suspend visas for legal travellers from countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Syria unless those nations accepted individuals deported from the UK. A Reform spokesperson stated the party's position as one of prioritising the interests of people in Britain and maintaining control over who enters the country.
Under Reform's proposals, nationals from Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia — alongside those from the other listed countries — would face a halt on new visa issuance, given that the party identified those nations as accounting for a considerable volume of UK visas. Where trade relationships with the UK exist but visa numbers are lower, the party set out a separate range of measures, including tariffs and airline bans, as tools to apply additional pressure.
Labour characterised the proposals as an act of political desperation on the government's part. Party chairwoman Bridget Phillipson described Nigel Farage as searching for new policy positions at a time when his party faces scandals, active police investigations, and internal pressure from Restore, adding that the proposal in question appeared to mirror Restore's own existing platform.
A Labour spokesperson argued that abandoning people fleeing war and persecution would represent a betrayal of widely held values, and that most voters would view such a position as an attack on those values. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp countered that the proposals largely replicate existing Conservative policy, pointing to measures such as barring asylum applications made after unauthorised entry, abolishing immigration tribunals, and ending Labour's resettlement programmes as positions his party had already adopted.
The party's BORDERS plan, as outlined by its spokesperson, would involve withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, establishing a target of removing people who enter without authorisation within seven days of arrival, and closing what the party describes as loopholes in modern slavery claims and judicial review proceedings — provisions the spokesperson contended were absent from Reform's equivalent proposals.
