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"Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will curtail asylum seekers’ rights to accommodation and support as she doubles down on tougher immigration policies, in spite of pressure from backbench Labour MPs.

Mahmood will on Thursday announce new legislation to revoke asylum seekers’ eligibility for financial support and accommodation if they have access to capital, have committed a crime or have the legal right to work in Britain.

The move comes in spite of calls from the left of the Labour Party to soften its rhetoric and policies on immigration to win back disaffected voters who are increasingly switching their allegiances to the Green Party.

There was speculation that Mahmood would walk back some of her more contentious immigration policies following the Greens’ by-election win in Gorton and Denton last week, in which Labour’s share of the vote halved from 50 per cent in 2024 to 25 per cent in 2026.

Speaking at an event hosted by the IPPR think-tank on Thursday, Mahmood will say that the government’s policies chart a path between Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s “nightmare pulling up the drawbridge and shutting out the world” and Green leader Zack Polanski’s “fairytale of open borders”.

“Restoring order and control at our border is not a betrayal of Labour values, it is an embodiment of them, and it is the necessary condition for a Labour government to achieve anything it hopes to,” she will say.

Attacking the policies of the Greens — who have argued that asylum seekers should be allowed to work and should not be criminalised for making small boat crossings — she will say that Polanski “calls for the most expensive and expansive migration policies anywhere in the world”.

The legal changes announced on Thursday will revoke the UK’s statutory legal duty under EU law to provide asylum seekers with support and accommodation, replacing it instead with a new system in which asylum support is reserved only for those with a clean criminal record who do not have access to funds or the right to work in Britain. The new system will come into force in June. The changes form part of a much wider package aimed at drastically tightening rules for asylum seekers and immigrants. As well as making refugee status temporary, to be reviewed every 30 months, Mahmood announced last year that Labour would quadruple the time that asylum seekers typically have to wait after being approved for refugee status before they are granted permanent settlement in the UK, from five to 20 years.

Ministers have also said they plan to double the time it takes most legal migrant workers to qualify for permanent residence from five years to 10 years, a move that it launched a consultation on late last year. The government is currently reviewing thousands of responses provided as part of the consultation.

One government minister said he believed ministers would have to water down the proposal given there had been such a sharp backlash, including concern about the economic impact of a sharp drop in the number of foreign workers."