Pause on Refugee Family Reunion Means More Family Separation

The latest last-minute announcement on Monday represents a marked shift in cruelty of the Labour Government.

In Yvette Cooper’s latest move, she has announced that Family Reunion applications under the scheme would be paused after 4 September 2025 at 3pm, with possible new restrictions introduced in 2026. Applications submitted before that date and time will be considered under the previous Family Reunion Scheme’s rules. Charities and human rights organisations have rightly condemned the move, ‘warning they would “push more desperate people into the arms of smugglers in an effort to reunite with loved ones”’. Organisations (including groups such as RAMFEL, Refugee Council and Safe Passages, and the Gaza Families Reunited Campaign) have long criticised the inadequacy of the existing Family Reunion rules in giving effect to the principle of family unity, but this latest move will do nothing to alleviate their rightful and significant concerns. 

The Refugee Convention was intended to establish that people will flee their homes and need to be accepted as refugees, with the associated protections that system provided; in the UK, that recognition only comes after battling through incredibly difficult and restrictive system. Given that many flee across borders and are torn apart from their families, Family Reunion then recognises that refugees will rightly wish to bring their loved ones to the UK, but may not have the finances wherewithal to pursue such an application; it was also intended to recognise that the loved ones of refugees are usually facing the same precarious situations and circumstances that the Home Office accepts that the refugees themselves are going through.  The system of Family Reunion was intended to centralise the universal right to family unity, focusing on those who have been forced apart from one another due to genocide, war, conflict, and persecution.

Until a new Family Reunion system with further restrictions is developed, refugees will subsequently need to apply through the Family Life Rules (under Appendix FM).But Appendix FM has long been subject to criticism by migrant rights organisations and even the House of Lord itself, being found to have been ‘Failing families’, and creating high socio-economic burdens on families and hindering the possibilities of facilitating integration. To extend these failings and discriminatory impacts onto an identified vulnerable category of people demonstrates the cruelty of Yvette Cooper’s Home Office, and the Labour Government more widely. Freezing the system of Family Reunion will inevitably force people to languish in limbo and shatter any hope for refugees to be reunited with their loved ones. 

Far from developing a compassionate system, Yvette Cooper and this Labour Government seeks to heighten the brutalisation of the British border to address the continued failings of austerity; there is no regard for the impacts of that cruelty on families, children and people who move, nor the likely ramifications of people being forced to take unsafe routes to the UK. This callous move by Labour takes us down an even darker road and further away from a fairer society: instead of a compassionate and fair system for all, refugees and people seeking asylum are being targeted, and even more families will be forced to languish in separation. 

Within a year of the racist, Islamophobic riots that swept the UK in August 2024 and the current racist riots continuing outside of asylum-seeker hotels, the Labour Party is still claiming to be trying to ‘address’ their concerns by ‘cracking down’ on people who move, targeting refugees, people seeking asylum and those who flee. In truth, their cruel approach solely demonstrates how far they are willing to go to attack the most vulnerable across our society. And, in a tale as old as time, it will do nothing to win back their voter base or prevent further racist riots or protests: as Gary Younge eloquently set out in 2002: ‘Appeasing racists won’t see them off’.