Fact checkPoliticsPublished October 12, 2026

“Since the Brexit referendum, about 500,000 people have been granted asylum in the United Kingdom.” — Nigel Farage. Our verdict: Unverified.

“Since the Brexit referendum, about 500,000 people have been granted asylum in the United Kingdom.” — Nigel Farage. Our verdict: Unverified.
Nigel FarageNews reportOctober 12, 2026

Nigel Farage made the claim while unveiling Reform's immigration plan, as reported by the Evening Standard.

Our verdict

Unverified

We could not confirm or refute Nigel Farage's claim that about 500,000 people have been granted asylum in the UK since the Brexit referendum. No public source we found gives a cumulative total of asylum grants covering the whole period from June 2016 to now.

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What we found

We checked whether Mr Farage made the statement, and whether the figure of 500,000 asylum grants since the Brexit referendum is correct. The first part is straightforward: the Evening Standard reported that he said it, so there is no doubt about what was claimed. The second part is where the problem lies. We looked for official figures that add up asylum grants from June 2016 to the present, and we could not find any. The sources we found give asylum-related statistics, but none of them provide a running total for the full period. Because there is no direct evidence either confirming or refuting the 500,000 figure, we cannot say whether the claim is accurate. Our verdict is therefore unverifiable.

The evidence

  • Background

    The Evening Standard reported that Nigel Farage claimed that since the Brexit referendum, 500,000 people have been granted asylum in the UK. This confirms he made the statement, but does not verify the number itself. [1]

What we could not confirm

  • No official cumulative figure for asylum grants covering the full period from June 2016 to the present was available to us.
  • The evidence we found does not separate asylum grants from other forms of settlement or citizenship, so we could not assess the figure precisely.
  • We could not independently verify the numerical claim beyond the reporting of Mr Farage's statement.

How we checked

We looked for official statistics and other public records that add up asylum grants in the UK from June 2016 onwards, and we checked reporting of the speech itself to confirm what was said. We could not find a source that gives a cumulative total for the whole period, so we could not confirm or refute the figure. If you have evidence that bears on this claim, please send it to us. We reviewed 1 relevant source.

Sources

  1. [1]www.standard.co.uk · Visa bans and asylum system suspension: Farage unveils Reform's immigration plan
  2. [2]Photo: Derek Bennett / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Help us check this claim

We could not find enough public evidence to confirm or refute this claim. If you know of an official record, dataset, transcript or report that settles it, send us the link. We review every submission and update this fact check when the evidence changes the picture.

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