Refugee and humanitarian advocates have slammed the UK’s plans to introduce harsh new asylum conditions.

Britain will drastically reduce protections for refugees and end automatic benefits for asylum seekers. The Labour government has announced new plans aimed at slashing irregular immigration and countering the rise in popularity of the of the right-wing Reform party.

Under the plans, people’s refugee status would be reviewed every two and a half years and their wait for permanent settlement could be extended to 20 years. It also understood that people granted asylum could be returned if their country is deemed safe.

Asylum seekers could have jewellery or other valuables taken to pay for the costs of processing their cases, a Home Office minister said.

Chief executive at the UK’s Refugee Council Enver Solomon said rather than deter migrants, the 20-year timeframe would “leave people in limbo and intense anxiety for many, many years”.

“We need a system that is controlled and is fair, and the way you do that is you make decisions fairly, in a timely fashion, and if someone is found to be a refugee, they go on and they contribute to our communities and they pay back,” he told the BBC.

Mr Solomon said concern about the increasing number of asylum claims was because people feel “the government has forgotten about their communities”.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory, said it is hard to measure the impact of individual policies on refugee numbers.

“At least initially, asylum seekers often don’t actually know what the policies are,” she told the BBC.

“Even with stricter rules, there are still many reasons people might come to the UK,” she said.

“They might speak English, have family in the country, or have already had asylum claims rejected elsewhere,” Prof Sumption said.

Church of England bishop The Rt Rev Dr Anderson Jeremiah said UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s comments on asylum seekers have shaken him “to the core” and argued people coming to the UK are being “scapegoated” for years of government policy failures.

The Rt Rev Dr Anderson, the bishop of Edmonton and the diocese of London’s lead for racial justice, said: “We are scapegoating asylum seekers for the failures and political divisions caused by successive governments in the last 15 years – the failures of successive governments to address wealth inequality, funding for education, the cost of living and primary healthcare and infrastructure”.

“Every day I meet homeless people who have fallen through the cracks in our system. And yet in singling out asylum seekers we are laying the burden of society’s problems on less than 1% of the UK population – when the number of millionaires and billionaires is on the rise.”

The measures, modelled on Denmark’s strict asylum system, were announced as Prime Minister Keir Starmer comes under pressure from surging popularity for the anti-immigrant Reform UK party.

Ms Mahmood has said that while the UK takes pride in welcoming those fleeing danger, the country’s generosity is drawing illegal migrants across the English Channel.

However, her hardline approach has already faced opposition from some Labour MPs, including Clive Lewis, who told the BBC the Danish system echoed “talking points of the far right” and warned left-wing Labour voters may turn to the Green Party in response.

A total of 109,343 people claimed asylum in the UK in the 12 months to March this year, a 17 per cent increase on the year before, according to government data.

The data says 1,069 migrants arrived in the UK in the last seven days.