Hadi Alodid, the 30-year-old Sudanese man charged with the knife attack on Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast, was granted refugee status in the UK under a “streamlined” asylum scheme introduced by then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to clear a backlog of more than 92,000 cases. Under the scheme, Alodid was able to gain permission to remain in the UK after completing a 10-page questionnaire rather than going through the meticulous face-to-face interview process it replaced. Home Office staff privately described the programme as a “grant factory.” Robert Jenrick was Immigration Minister when the scheme was running. He has since defected to Reform UK.
As we reported in our Jenrick community note piece, Jenrick condemned the attack as “barbaric” – and was community-noted by X users within hours pointing out that he held ministerial responsibility for exactly this period of immigration policy. Suella Braverman was Home Secretary. Both are now Reform MPs who have described the attack as “a direct result of treacherous Tory and Labour immigration policy.”
How the scheme worked
The Streamlined Asylum Process was introduced in February 2023 under the Sunak government as a response to a backlog of more than 92,000 pending asylum cases. Rather than requiring applicants to attend in-person interviews, the scheme allowed asylum seekers from certain countries – Sudan, Syria, Eritrea, Yemen, Libya and Afghanistan – to apply via a 10-page questionnaire on the basis that the majority of claims from those countries were being granted anyway, given the ongoing conflicts in their homelands.
The rationale was efficiency: the face-to-face process was taking too long, the backlog was politically damaging, and cases from high-grant countries were being treated as a formality by interviewers in any case. The questionnaire would deliver the same outcome faster.
Home Office staff, according to the Daily Mail, did not welcome the scheme. They described it internally as a “grant factory” due to the high approval rate it produced. One Tory source said staff “did not want” it but had it “forced” upon them by Sunak. The same source said: “It was the worst of both worlds because he failed to stop small boats across the Channel and, at the same time, made it easier to win asylum. It was totally illogical.”
Migration Watch UK called it “dangerous folly” and “asylum amnesty in all but name” when it was introduced.
The scheme is still in place.
The numbers
The impact on Sudanese asylum applications has been significant. Before the scheme was introduced, 2,853 Sudanese asylum seekers came to Britain in 2022. Last year the figure was 5,112. In the year to March 2026, the Home Office granted asylum to 95% of claims from Sudanese nationals.
Alodid arrived not via small boat across the Channel but through a different route. He travelled from Dublin to Northern Ireland in 2023 – a route that exploits the Common Travel Area between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, under which there are no passport checks at the Irish border. Albanian gangs have reportedly been promoting this route on TikTok as a safe alternative to small boat crossings. One TikTok post, filmed inside Dublin Airport, reads: “Every day, only success. Reserve your place. Guaranteed passage to England.”
The Dublin-to-Belfast route is separate from the Streamlined Asylum Process question – but it is part of the same broader picture of how the previous government’s immigration management created multiple points of entry that proved difficult to control.
The political ownership problem – again
This story creates the same political difficulty for Reform that we documented in our Jenrick community note piece and our Starmer Tice PMQs piece. The fast-track scheme under which Alodid was granted asylum is a Conservative policy, introduced by Sunak, with Jenrick as Immigration Minister. It was criticised at the time by Migration Watch and opposed internally by Home Office staff.
Reform’s Zia Yusuf described the Belfast attack as “a direct result of treacherous Tory and Labour immigration policy,” as we reported in our Polanski Yusuf piece. Reform’s framing of Labour and Tory immigration failures as equivalent – ignoring that the specific scheme under which this case arose was a Conservative invention – requires the party’s former Conservative members to simultaneously attack the policies they implemented and the colleagues who implemented them alongside them.
The scheme remains in place under the current Labour government, which creates a more legitimate line of attack for Reform on its continuation. But its origins are unambiguous.
Jonathan Hall – and the nuance worth keeping
Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terror laws, made significant comments in the wake of the Belfast violence. He said immigration must now be “treated as a national security threat” and that the Belfast events had been “extraordinarily destabilising.”
But his full statement is more nuanced than the headline: “Ultimately, national security is to help the nation, and having a stable nation where people feel they can go about their business. At the moment, there are people who happen to be black and brown, but as British as you and me, who probably feel they can’t go about that business, and that is destabilising the nation.”
This is a significant point to preserve in the coverage of this story. The riots that followed the Belfast attack have made Black and brown British people – people who had nothing to do with the attack, people who were born here and have lived here all their lives – feel less safe in their own communities. Hall’s national security framing is not simply about managing asylum claims. It is about what happens to British society when a single violent incident committed by one person from one country is used to generate generalised hostility toward everyone who shares that ethnicity.
As we reported in our Mehdi Hasan Musk piece, Hasan made exactly this point: the far-right pattern is to find a specific case and use it to amplify generalised hostility. Hall, from the very different vantage point of the independent reviewer of terror laws, is making the same observation about the same dynamic from a national security perspective.
Leave a Reply