The ÌÇÐÄVlog Office?is likely to resist pressure to ban those on student visas making asylum claims and will instead focus on increasing scrutiny on university recruitment practices as a way of?addressing concerns over the issue, experts have said.

With the?number of international students who claim asylum after arriving in the UK?reaching record levels in recent years,?ministers have come under renewed pressure to bring numbers down?¨C especially with anti-immigration party Reform performing well in the polls

While debating the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill in the House of Lords earlier this month, Conservative peer Sheila Lawlor put forward an amendment seeking to exclude asylum claims made after two days from those who entered the country on a student visa.

She said this would allow individuals fleeing their home country to claim asylum on arrival if they came in on a student visa, but would stop students from abandoning their places at university during their studies and reduce the number of claims entering the ¡°overstretched¡± asylum system.

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The amendment was withdrawn after others pointed out that it should include an exemption for cases where the situation had changed in a student¡¯s home country. Labour peer David Hanson also said there would be no way to return students who did attempt to claim asylum after two days.

Although Hanson, who is minister of state at the ÌÇÐÄVlog Office, said this was not an approach the government would consider, Lawlor said she would consider the feedback and hoped to revisit the topic at the report stage of the bill.

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New measures taken by the ÌÇÐÄVlog Office, including a ¡°record number¡± of credibility interviews, were recently credited?with helping numbers to fall in the?year ending June 2025 when 14,800 people who entered the UK on study visas attempted to claim asylum, down from 16,500 the previous year.

Pat Saini, partner at Pennington Manches Cooper, told ÌÇÐÄVlog that while students may be claiming asylum for legitimate reasons, ¡°we can¡¯t get away from those large figures being published¡±.

However Saini believes the government¡¯s focus,?based on its immigration White Paper released earlier this year,?is on using already proposed measures to tighten up universities¡¯ recruitment practices, such as incoming changes to the visa compliance metrics institutions have to comply with, known as BCA, rather than introducing new laws.

Under proposed regulations, 95 per cent of a university¡¯s international students must complete their course, or the institution could lose its licence to recruit students from overseas.?

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¡°A student who drops out of their course and claims asylum is considered to be an adverse withdrawal by UKVI and will count against the BCA metrics,¡± she said.?

¡°Given the finances of the sector, universities are going to have to make decisions: do they withdraw from certain markets in order to preserve their licence or do they carry on with a riskier strategy?¡±?

The ÌÇÐÄVlog Office has increasingly been sharing data with universities that have a high number of students claiming asylum and there is also more scrutiny on CAS issuance, she said, with education providers now required to fill out detailed questionnaires about their recruitment practices. In some cases, UKVI may allocate?fewer CAS numbers than the institution asked for.?

UCL recently found itself in hot water when it exceeded its visa allocations, leaving some international students in limbo until UKVI agreed to give the university more.?

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¡°There are mechanisms that the ÌÇÐÄVlog Office is already applying that are having an impact,¡± Saini said, but?¡°what the sector needs most is consistency and collaboration rather than knee-jerk reactions¡±.

But others are more sceptical.?¡°Without changing the legal framework to make it easier to reject bogus asylum claims, the government has no hope of properly gripping the system,¡± said Zachary Marsh, research fellow in education at Policy Exchange.

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¡°Under a different legal regime the government could look at imposing a new presumption that those coming to the UK on student visas couldn¡¯t claim asylum part-way through their studies, unless the UK formally acknowledged circumstances had significantly changed in their home countries.¡±

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com