Shabana Mahmood is Britain's home secretary, appointed on September 5th 2025 in a cabinet reshuffle by Keir Starmer. She replaced Yvette Cooper, who moved to the Foreign Office. She describes securing the borders as her "one job" and has promised to weaken human-rights laws and deport more migrants.
The Home Office admits it does not have an accurate figure for the size of Britain's illegal population (an independent estimate in 2017 suggested 700,000-900,000, now likely higher). Nor does it have reliable figures for visa overstays, the nationality or employment of those legally present, or where people live. When a residence scheme was created for EU citizens after Brexit, officials expected 3.7m cases; in the end 5.6m people applied. Britain does not have identity cards or a population register, unlike much of continental Europe. ATLAS, a new IT system for visa and asylum cases, launched after years of delay.
In January 2026 Ms Mahmood published a white paper outlining the biggest police reforms in Britain in almost two centuries. The centrepiece is a new National Police Service (NPS), which will set practices, standardise IT systems, centralise procurement and assume responsibility for serious and organised crime, including terrorism. The NPS has been dubbed a "British FBI"—a label previously applied to the National Crime Agency (created in 2013), the Serious Organised Crime Agency (2006) and the National Criminal Intelligence Service before that. Ms Mahmood also wants to merge the patchwork of 43 independent local police forces into larger regional ones; an independent review, due to report in the summer of 2026, will determine how many (perhaps around 13). She has promised 13,000 extra officers on the beat.
In January 2026 Ms Mahmood said she had lost confidence in Craig Guildford, the chief constable of West Midlands Police, after the force proposed banning fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli football team, from a match against Aston Villa. The police report cited an earlier fixture against West Ham that never took place—a hallucination by Microsoft Copilot, an artificial-intelligence tool. Ms Mahmood called for the restoration of powers to sack failing police leaders.
On November 17th 2025 Ms Mahmood outlined sweeping changes to Britain's asylum system, saying migration had made the country "a more divided place". The state would drop its legal obligation to support destitute asylum-seekers. Refugees would receive 30-month grants of asylum, renewable but reviewable, rather than five-year grants with a quicker path to citizenship; some would wait 20 years for citizenship. Ms Mahmood says migrants should "earn" citizenship by doing things like volunteering. She also announced plans to tighten how British courts apply the European Convention on Human Rights, placing more emphasis on the public interest when weighing deportations and narrowing Article 8 "family-life" claims. The inspiration for the tough new line came from Denmark, which is mentioned seven times in the government's policy paper.
A mind is a wonderful thing to waste.