The no-BS guide to asylum in Wales
What the Nation of Sanctuary really is and the reality for refugees in Cymru
Today there will be a debate in the Senedd, tabled by Reform, which:
“Calls on the Welsh Government to scrap the Nation of Sanctuary plan”.
It is perfectly legitimate for the opposition inside the Senedd to question public spending. It is literally their job.
However, it’s really important that we debate, discuss and make decisions based on facts and rooted firmly in reality.
This is a topic that really matters. Not just for the human beings impacted directly but because a functioning asylum system is of great benefit to Wales and the UK.
To put this piece together we have partnered with the Welsh Refugee Council to help you understand the issue.
The true picture of asylum in Wales
Reporting by Marcus Hughes
Let’s start with the numbers.
There are 3,308 people awaiting a decision on an asylum application living in Wales, according to the most recent figures released for May 2026.
That’s less than 4% of the 94,000 people seeking refuge who are dispersed around the wider United Kingdom - well below Wales’ population share.
As a proportion of Wales’ population, it’s about 0.1%. If you put every asylum seeker in Wales inside Penydarren Park (Merthyr Town FC’s ground), it would only be three quarters full.
The issue of people seeking asylum is literally a global problem.
The United Nations Refugee Agency estimates there were 117.8 million forcibly displaced people at the end of 2025. That’s up from 65.6 million people worldwide in 2016.
The UK is the fifth largest recipient of asylum seekers compared to the 27 EU member states, receiving about 10% of the total. But it’s worth bearing in mind that we are also second only to Germany when it comes to our total population. In terms of the number of asylum applications per head of population, the UK ranks 15th in Europe.
The number of people claiming asylum to the UK and the top 4 countries in the EU+
During the Senedd election this year, immigration, the asylum system, and Wales’ Nation of Sanctuary policy became priority topics of discussion for some parties.
In the opening weeks of the seventh Senedd, it has continued to be a dominant issue.
Today, Reform UK’s leader in Wales Dan Thomas has tabled a motion in the Senedd calling on the Welsh Government to scrap the Nation of Sanctuary plan.
Given this is an area that has inflamed some public debate recently, we felt it was time to take a deeper look at what the situation in Wales actually is, and what it’s like for the people who seek refuge in our country.
Why do people seek refuge in the UK?
People flee their countries and take refuge in another one for a host of complex reasons.
In the main part, it’s to distance themselves and/or their families from war, persecution or violence.
And there’s a lot of conflict currently happening in the world.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, there are 130 armed conflicts involving 60 countries, and 120 non-state armed groups ongoing worldwide at the moment.
That’s a record and about double the number of wars happening 15 years ago.
Ukraine, Gaza/ Palestine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, and Myanmar are key areas where war is leading to significant displacement of people.
In Sudan alone, 14 million people (or a quarter of the population) have been displaced in just three years.
You might be a young man, living in a country where tensions between groups are rising and you could be required to fight on a certain side. Rather than take up arms and potentially be forced to harm or even kill people, you might decide to leave at great personal risk.
You might be a woman, facing a life in a country where where you face serious persecution because of your sex or where you’re at risk of sexual violence, forced marriage or trafficking.
Increasingly, climate change is also becoming a factor (although isn’t recognised as grounds for refugee status alone). In every part of the world, changing weather patterns are making food production more difficult, and weather-related disasters more frequent. If food or water is scarce, it can cause greater conflict over those limited resources.
As a trend, the number of people experiencing forcible displacement globally is getting worse:
This issue isn’t going away, so we need to get it right.
What does someone seeking asylum in Wales actually get?
Someone arriving in a country claiming to need sanctuary from war or persecution is legally defined as “seeking asylum”.
People with that status are not allowed to work, so the Home Office provides a very small amount of money to cover the very basic needs of survival and they are given accommodation.
The individual or family doesn’t decide where they are placed, they’re sent wherever there is capacity and the decision is made by the Home Office. That may be Wales, but it could equally be anywhere from Cornwall to Glasgow.
The basic payment is £49.18 a week per person. £7 a day.
That’s to cover everything including food, toiletries, non-prescription medication, clothing, footwear, travel and anything else we might consider a basic need like a mobile phone or access to the internet.
In rare cases, the initial accommodation provides meals in which case the amount of money a person gets will drop to £9.95 a week. If you’re a pregnant mother, or have a child aged one to three, you get an extra £5.25 a week. If you have a baby under one you are given an extra £9.50 a week.
It is difficult to comprehend how little that money is to live on in Wales in 2026.
Earlier this week I took a bus from Newport to Cardiff. The day ticket cost me £6.70.
If I had been a single adult asylum seeker living in accommodation with meals provided, that one journey alone would have cost me almost two thirds of my weekly allowance - leaving me with just £3.25 for everything else: toiletries, clothes, a phone credit top-up etc.
Accommodation for someone claiming asylum is again funded by the Home Office.
A private company called Clearsprings Ready Homes Ltd is the contracted supplier of all the accommodation in Wales and some in the south of England. Last year the company reported £90m in annual profits.
The concept of hotels being used as a form of temporary accommodation for those seeking refuge has proved divisive in recent years. But very few people are actually housed in this way in Wales. Most people are housed in what’s called dispersed private accommodation, across Wales’ 22 local authorities.
There are no published figures for the number of hotels used for this purpose in Wales, but according to the figures for May, only 100 of those 3,308 people awaiting a decision on an asylum claim were housed in a hotel.
And it’s far from a luxury experience.
Meals are more likely to be provided in this sort of accommodation. Across the UK, concerns have been raised about the quality of what is on offer in that type of arrangement. There have been claims some of the food provided is poor quality, and doesn’t always cater properly for an individual’s dietary requirements.
And it also can lead to greater isolation. Being siloed into a hotel could limit your contact with people around you, making it more difficult to work on your language skills or create new links to the community where you’re now living.
It can take a year or more for an application to be processed. Only when an application is accepted does a person gain refugee status. That gives the person permission to stay (or leave to remain), and only then can they take on paid work or get access to the mainstream benefits system.
In the year to March 2026, 48,581 people were granted refugee protection or other leave at initial decision across the UK. It’s down from a peak of 67,678 in the year to March 2024, and remains high due to the increased number of claims being made.
This is what the figures look like for the UK:
So right now we have a system which:
Stops people contributing to Welsh society
Puts them in limbo for over a year
Prevents them from integrating
Leaves them isolated
These are the very issues that the Nation of Sanctuary is trying to deal with.
The Nation of Sanctuary and the issue it’s trying to address
Wales has no power to control asylum applications and as one of the four nations of the UK, it has to contribute to housing people.
The Labour Welsh Government introduced the Nation of Sanctuary plan with the aim of helping people who are granted leave to remain find employment and help them integrate as active members of society. Plaid and the Welsh Conservatives also spoke in support of the policy at the time.
Once someone has refugee status they have 42 days to find a place to live and secure their own form of income. This is an incredibly difficult barrier to overcome.
Many people who have spent their entire lives in the UK would struggle to secure those two things in 42 days from a standing start.
Refugees granted leave to remain are assessed according to housing need in the same way as other applicants. So a parent with two children would have the same priority as someone born in the UK with the same need.
But a single person with no dependents would have limited priority. A working age man with no kids will not be prioritised over a single mum with children, being a refugee has no bearing on where they sit on the waiting list.
They would have to rent somewhere privately, which is getting very expensive. Recent estimates put the average cost of securing a rented property in Wales at £1,500 (taking into account deposits and first month rent). You’d have to secure that at the same time as finding a job after living on less than £50 a week for more than a year – it’s not easy.
Who is coming here?
The top six countries of origin of people seeking asylum in the UK are Pakistan, Eritrea, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sudan.
Many arrive with considerable skills that could be put to very effective use in Wales, and once integrated work hard to contribute to the society that has housed them.
But it’s not without challenges. Others arrive having lost years of education, qualifications that are not recognised in the UK, or carrying trauma that makes rebuilding a working life much harder.
Below are examples offered by the Welsh Refugee Council demonstrating some of the ways the Nation of Sanctuary plan has helped people prepare for working life while their application is ongoing. They say that they can avoid the cliff-edge of that 42-day window to gain employment and find independent accommodation.
Hiba
Hiba spent years building a career as a broadcast journalist in Sudan.
After graduating from Ahfad University for Women, she worked for the Sudan National Broadcast Corporation – a skilled storyteller, communicator, and someone with deep roots in her community.
When she left Sudan, Hiba was forced to leave behind her family, her career and the life she’d built for herself.
Eventually arriving in Wales, she sought safety but at the same time was navigating loss, uncertainty and the massive challenge of working her way through a complex system.
She says she felt welcomed in Wales.
“Wales welcomed me with warmth,” she said. “Strangers showed me kindness, and slowly, I began to feel like I belonged.”
Although people awaiting a decision on their asylum application can’t work, Hiba desperately wanted to contribute. She says The Nation of Sanctuary plan helped her be able to volunteer as an interpreter and assistant caseworker for the Welsh Refugee Council. She shadowed staff, worked directly with clients and built confidence navigating systems that can be difficult for anyone, let alone someone trying to rebuild after displacement.
Once her refugee status was granted, she used the experience she gained volunteering to work in a similar field and is now a caseworker with the Ethnic Minority Youth Support Team charity.
“To be honest, many of the skills that helped prepare me for my current job were developed from volunteering with WRC,” she said.
“I am a refugee, but I am so much more than that. I am a storyteller. I have a good sense of humour. I am dedicated to giving back to the communities I belong to.”
Words matter
The term “illegal immigrant” isn’t recognised in immigration law and is widely agreed to be a dehumanising way to reference a person.
A person’s immigration status could be unlawful, but a person themselves cannot be “illegal”.
The only way to claim asylum in the UK is to do so once you’re already here. There is no “asylum visa” you can pre-arrange.
That means some people have to travel to the UK through what’s known as an “irregular route” – that might be a channel crossing on a boat. The only other way is to travel to the UK with one type of visa (like a student visa for example). Once in the UK, they can declare themselves to an immigration official and then they are protected by humanitarian law.
If a person has their asylum claim rejected, then they have “no legal right to remain” and they become liable for removal from the country (if their appeal process is exhausted).
Bilal
Bilal built up a wealth of experience in the field of design when he lived in Syria.
He sought asylum in Wales with his wife who is studying for a PhD. With existing skills he could easily transfer, Bilal took advantage of employability workshops that helped him learn about Welsh workplace culture, prepare a CV in a UK format, and practice interview skills. He did this while his asylum application was still being processed so he was prepared by the time his refugee status was granted.
Now, Bilal works as a senior design engineer creating anatomical models and learning materials for medical students. The models replicate parts of the human body and internal organs, assisting healthcare workers in their education before going on to support the NHS.
Are refugees contributing to crime in Wales?
Recently, those seeking to criticise Wales’ approach to supporting refugees have pointed to high profile violent crimes committed by people from overseas.
In a question to the First Minister asking about “potential risks to public safety” of the Nation of Sanctuary scheme, Joe Martin MS referred to an attack in Belfast for which a Sudanese man has been arrested, and the murder of Rhiannon Whyte in Walsall.
There is very little research on the impact of refugees on crime rates in the UK. The UK Government doesn’t publish data on recorded crimes based on people’s asylum or refugee status.
There is therefore no evidential base to conclude refugees commit more crime than people born in the UK. Individual cases will inevitably attract a disproportionate amount of attention but it doesn’t mean they are representative.
There are, however, some wider studies looking at whether there is a link between immigration more generally and criminal behaviour. A 2013 study found no evidence of causal link in England and Wales and a report published in 2017 by Kent University suggested there could be a link between falling crime rates and waves of immigration.
The Oxford University Migration Observatory found that compared to people born in the UK, migrants are more likely to be of working age and have a university degree.
Whether we have a Nation of Sanctuary plan or not – Wales will still have to house refugees
There are two reasons the UK, and Wales as one of its four nations, is obligated to accept people who seek refuge, regardless of whether we pursue the Nation of Sanctuary plan or not.
The first is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights that enshrines the right to seek asylum. It was adopted by the UN in the aftermath of the Second World War to prevent a repeat of the sorts of atrocities millions of people had just experienced, like the Holocaust, and established a global standard of basic freedoms and dignity for every individual.
The second is the 1951 Refugee Convention, of which 149 countries are party to including the UK. The convention outlines basic minimum standards for the treatment of refugees, including rights to housing, work and education while displaced. It is enforceable under international law.
The Welsh Government has no power to back out of this. The UK Government alone holds the power to change policies around asylum and refugees.
Since its inception in 2019 to 2025, when the most up to date figures are available, the net cost of the Nation of Sanctuary has been just under £64 million.
£58 million of that was spent on the Ukraine response (91% of the total). It supported local authorities in the added cost pressures on them, and provided remuneration for ordinary people who hosted refugees within their homes.
Around £4 million over six years was spent on the wider support and integration services for asylum seekers and refugees, including:
Wales Sanctuary Service - Delivered by the Welsh Refugee Council to help give people advice on things like housing and their rights.
English language support - To aid integration and help people be prepared for work.
Pathways into further education and work.
£64 million represents 0.05% of the Welsh Government’s budget over that period.
Its proponents argue that responsibly supporting people who settle in Wales for humanitarian protection is an investment that saves money in the long run. If people are supported into work, they contribute economically and pay taxes. If people are allowed to fall into destitution, they risk becoming a costly problem for health services, council services and the criminal justice system.
If they are effectively integrated into a community, establishing friendships and bonds with local groups, schools, and neighbourhoods, it cuts down on the sorts of social problems that can cause issues for everyone.
But whether or not Wales should be spending money on supporting people who settle here, returning 0.05% of the budget back to the Welsh Government will not make a meaningful difference to the delivery of public services in Wales.
If you are worried about asylum seekers, you should support the Nation of Sanctuary policy
In simple terms, if you are concerned about refugees because you think they won’t integrate, learn English or Cymraeg, contribute or be useful to Welsh society, then the Nation of Sanctuary is literally designed to tackle these concerns.
Thanks for reading and to the Welsh Refugee Council for working with us on this. You can find out more about their work here.
Take care and we will see you later today for a stacked midweek briefing.
The Newsletter Team
This newsletter is so informative. Thanks so much for providing us with the facts required to rebut the false narratives being perpetrated by amongst others Reform Senedd Members. I'm sure the Llywydd will have his work cut out to chair the debate around the Nation of Sanctuary motion and I hope that all Senedd members will remain in the chamber and not cede ground to the opponents of the Nation of Sanctuary.
Very good neutral account of the issues. If I shared it to my community Facebook group (an area of North Wales where this is a particularly inflammatory issue), would people be able to read all of it without subscribing?