Migrants: Safe and Legal Routes

Answer from The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Shabana Mahmood)

Alongside restoring order and control of our borders, we will open new safe and legal routes for refugees and displaced people who are fleeing danger. We are currently developing routes for refugee students and workers alongside a community sponsorship route. A cap will be set each year in Parliament, and further details on the design of these routes will be set out in due course.

Answer from The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Shabana Mahmood)

Safe and legal routes relate to those who we would accept as refugees before they enter this country, in order to drive down the number of people who seek to enter the country illegally. My hon. Friend refers to routes for people who come to this country to work. It is right that we acknowledge, as we have done in our planned reforms to settlement, that settlement in this country is a privilege that has to be earned, not a right. It is perfectly proper for this country to be able to set the rules for how settlement is earned. Previous considerations about how many people might arrive through particular routes in order to work have shown that more people have arrived than anticipated, and therefore it is right that we change our approach; the discussion about care workers is particularly pertinent to that point. We are consulting on how those changes are delivered—as he rightly points out, that consultation ends on 12 February—and we will then set out our proposals for delivering our reforms.