Left Behind by Design:
LGBTQI+ Asylum Seekers and the Immigration and Asylum Bill 2026
Rainbow Hospitality has produced a report outlining how the Immigration and Asylum Bill 2026 leaves out LGBTQI+ asylum seekers and the issues the Bill could cause for them if it passes in its current state.
Full report is available for download here:
Executive Summary
The Immigration and Asylum Bill 2026 rewrites large parts of the UK’s asylum and appeals system: how family life is defined for the purposes of human rights claims, how credibility is assessed, how protection status is granted, and who hears appeals when a claim is refused. Having checked, none of these changes were designed with LGBTQI+ asylum seekers specifically in mind. Across the second reading debate on 13 July 2026 no MP on either side of the House mentioned sexual orientation and gender identity. That silence matters. LGBTQI+ asylum seekers face evidential and legal problems other claimants do not. A same-sex relationship is harder to prove when it had to stay hidden to survive. Disclosure often comes late, not through evasiveness, but because many claimants never knew disclosure was possible, or spent a lifetime treating concealment as a survival habit. Even being believed is harder. This briefing’s own evidence shows, in claimants’ own words, credibility tests that ask people to prove they are a “correct” or recognisable kind of gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans person, rather than asking whether they are telling the truth about the danger they face.
Five things in the Bill exacerbate these issues:
The new family life test (s.117AA) gives a same-sex couple only two ways to be recognised as a family: living together, or meeting a strict dependency test built for a different situation entirely (an elderly parent, a disabled adult child). Neither route works for a couple who cannot live together because doing so could expose them to discovery and persecution.
The new credibility rules (s.36 and s.11) treat late disclosure of any fact as damaging to a claimant’s credibility unless “good reasons” are shown. This does not account for the fact that many LGBTQI+ claimants disclose late precisely because disclosure is what they have spent their life avoiding, or because they did not know it was a valid basis for a claim at all.
The new “core protection” model (clause 21) merges two existing forms of protection into one and removes the right of appeal for someone who is granted the lesser form but refused the greater one. We already have a documented case of exactly this misclassification happening to a lesbian asylum seeker, later corrected only on appeal. This clause would make that correction impossible.
The new asylum support repayment scheme (clauses 23–24) requires people to repay support once they can work. LGBTQI+ claimants already tend to wait longer than other claimants before their case is resolved, because of the credibility problems above, so they are also likely to build up the largest support debts in the meantime.
The new appeals body (the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority, or IIAA) will mostly be staffed by adjudicators who are not legally qualified. This matters here specifically. The case law on how to assess concealment and credibility in sexual orientation and gender identity claims is genuinely difficult, and has tripped up legally qualified judges before.
Each point above corresponds to a narrow, specific, evidenced amendment. For balance, one genuine improvement in the Bill:
A new requirement for the IIAA to publish most of its decisions, which could in time fix the near-total absence of usable data on how sexual orientation and gender identity claims are decided in the UK.
