What happened
The bill followed two Telegraph investigations that shaped its framing. In November 2025, a whistleblowing Home Office caseworker said staff could approve asylum claims from people charged with crimes as long as the offence being prosecuted didn't meet the one-year sentencing threshold — she said she was disciplined after refusing to approve an Afghan man's claim despite his repeated arrests for indecent exposure in a children's play area. Then, days before the bill's publication, the Telegraph reported almost 20,000 foreign offenders identified for deportation were living freely in Britain, more than double the 8,500 recorded in 2020, and that a Telegraph analysis of over 400 immigration appeals found sex offenders, robbers, fraudsters, arsonists, and domestic abusers had successfully used Article 8 family-life claims to block removal.
Under the bill, a deportation can still be judged "disproportionate" in defined exceptional circumstances: lawful residence for most of the person's life with genuine social and cultural integration, "very significant obstacles" to reintegrating in the destination country, or a "genuine and subsisting" relationship with a partner or child living with them. Migrants who form family relationships while in the UK illegally lose the ability to use those relationships to block removal at all, and Article 8 claims generally are restricted to migrants who live with their spouse, partner, or child — a narrower test than the one successfully used in the appeals the Telegraph documented.
The scale of the change is significant: expanding the scope from foreign offenders sentenced to 12+ months to all foreign offenders means minor offences newly fall within a presumption-to-deport framework, not just the serious violent and sexual offences that dominated the public case for the bill. The Home Office's own admission that the real-world impact is "uncertain," and that over half of those refused leave to remain would likely evade deportation anyway, suggests the headline 14,000-a-year figure may substantially overstate what the policy actually achieves in practice.