People granted asylum in the UK will only be allowed to stay in the country temporarily, in the changes expected to be unveiled on Monday by Shabana Mahmood.
Modelled on the Danish system, the aim is to make the UK less attractive for illegal immigrants and make it easier to deport them.
Planned changes mean that refugee status will become temporary and subject to regular review, with refugees removed as soon as their home countries are deemed safe.
The Home Office said the "golden ticket" deal has seen asylum claims surge in the UK, drawing people across Europe, through safe countries, onto dangerous small boats.
Under current UK rules, those granted refugee status have it for five years and can then apply for indefinite leave to remain and get on a route to citizenship.
As part of the changes, the statutory legal duty to provide asylum seeker support, including housing and weekly allowances, will be revoked.
The government will seek to remove asylum support, including accommodation and handouts, to those who have a right to work and who can support themselves but choose not to or those who break UK law.
Warning if 'moderate forces fail'
A government source said Ms Mahmood believes her reforms are about "more than the electoral fortunes of her party".
"This is the last chance for a decent, mainstream politics. If these moderate forces fail, she believes, something darker will follow," they said.
"But this demands that moderates are willing to do things that will seem immoderate to some. She has reminded those who are reluctant to embrace her ambition for bold reform, with an ultimatum: 'if you don't like this, you won't like what follows me'."
Biggest asylum changes 'in a generation'
Ms Mahmood said they were the most sweeping changes to the asylum system "in a generation", as she vowed the government will "restore order and control to our borders".
The home secretary also told The Sunday Times that "I can see - and I know my colleagues can - that illegal migration is tearing our country apart".
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System being 'gamed'
The source said Ms Mahmood believes the system is being "gamed by those travelling on boats or abusing legal visas".
Some 39,075 people have arrived in the UK after making the journey across the Channel so far this year, according to the latest Home Office figures.
That is an increase of 19% on the same point in 2024 and up 43% on 2023, but remains 5% lower than at the equivalent point in 2022, which remains the peak year for crossings.
What happened in Denmark?
The UK government points to Denmark remaining a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, while also cutting the number of asylum applications to the lowest number in 40 years and successfully removing 95% of rejected asylum seekers.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the Labour government has "lost control" of the UK's borders with illegal channel crossings "surging to over 62,000 since the election".
He said some of the new measures were welcome but "they stop well short of what is really required and some are just yet more gimmicks - like the previous 'smash the gangs' gimmick".
Mr Philp added: "Only the Conservative borders plan will end illegal immigration - by leaving the ECHR, banning asylum claims for illegal immigrants, deporting all illegal arrivals within a week and establishing a Removals Force to deport 150,000 illegal immigrants each year."
And Enver Solomon, chief executive of Refugee Council, said: "These sweeping changes will not deter people from making dangerous crossings, but they will unfairly prevent men, women and children from putting down roots and integrating into British life."
Shabana Mahmood will be appearing on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips from 8.30am this morning.
Bafflement, anger, disappointment, and sheer frustration are all on relatively open display at the circular firing squad which seems to have surrounded the prime minister.
The botched effort to flush out backroom plotters and force Wes Streeting to declare his loyalty ahead of the budget has instead led even previously loyal Starmerites to predict the PM could be forced out of office before the local elections in May.
"We have so many councillors coming up for election across the country," one says, "and at the moment it looks like they're going to be wiped out. That's our base - we just can't afford to lose them. I like Keir [Starmer] but there's only a limited window left to turn things around. There's a real question of urgency."
Another criticised a "boys club" at No 10 who they claimed have "undermined" the prime minister and "forgotten they're meant to be serving the British people."
There's clearly widespread muttering about what to do next - and even a degree of enviousness at the lack of a regicidal 1922 committee mechanism, as enjoyed by the Tories.
"Leadership speculation is destabilising," one said. "But there's really no obvious strategy. Andy Burnham isn't even an MP. You'd need a stalking horse candidate and we don't have one. There's no 1922. It's very messy."
Others are gunning for the chancellor after months of careful pitch-rolling for manifesto-breaching tax rises in the budget were ripped up overnight.
"Her career is toast," one told me. "Rachel has just lost all credibility. She screwed up on the manifesto. She screwed up on the last two fiscal events, costing the party huge amounts of support and leaving the economy stagnating.
"Having now walked everyone up the mountain of tax rises and made us vote to support them on the opposition day debate two days ago, she's now worried her job is at risk and has bottled it.
"Talk to any major business or investor and they are holding off investing in the UK until it is clear what the UK's tax policy is going to be, putting us in a situation where the chancellor is going to have to go through this all over again in six months - which just means no real economic growth for another six months."
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After less than 18 months in office, the government is stuck in a political morass largely of its own making.
Treasury sources have belatedly argued that the chancellor's pre-budget change of heart on income tax is down to better-than-expected economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility.
That should be a cause of celebration. The question is whether she and the PM are now too damaged to make that case to the country - and rescue their benighted prospects.
Footage from a holiday campsite in Albufeira, where an 85-year-old British woman was killed, shows the extent of the damage caused by the extreme winds, which reached up to 114kmph in Portugal's southern region of the Algarve.
Regional commander of the Algarve, Vitor Vaz Pinto, said dozens of people were injured in the area after Storm Claudia hit, two of whom were seriously injured.
The injured were of Portuguese, Spanish and British nationalities and ranged in age from six to 85 years old.
Follow the latest updates on Storm Claudia
According to media reports, the woman was initially reported missing at a campsite and later found dead.
SIC, which is Sky News' Portuguese partner network, said an "extreme wind phenomenon" occurred around 10am on Saturday at the holiday site.
Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro expressed his "heartfelt condolences" to the family of the British woman and wished a "speedy recovery" to those who have been injured after the strong winds hit.
Portuguese media described the extreme weather in the Algarve as a tornado.
The storm, which was named by the Spanish meteorological service, affected Portugal and parts of Spain, Britain and Ireland.
Sky News' weather presenter Jo Wheeler said the IPMA, or Portuguese Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere, had issued red rain warnings and severe wind warnings "well ahead of the storm's arrival".
She said there have been more than 2,434 weather-related incidents reported in the Algarve, including a downburst - a strong downward rush of air from a thunderstorm, causing similar damage to a tornado but linear rather than rotational -at Praia da Carvoeiro, with wind gusts of 114 km/hour.
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Wheeler added that the presence of a tornado in Albufeira was yet to be confirmed, but it would account for the extent of the damage seen.
On Thursday, rescue workers found the bodies of an elderly couple inside their flooded home in Fernao Ferro, across the River Tagus from Lisbon.
Storm Claudia in the UK
In the UK, Storm Claudia caused severe flooding in the town of Monmouth and surrounding areas in southeastern Wales on Saturday.
Senedd Member Peter Fox described the impact as being "devastating".
Rescues, evacuations, and welfare checks were being carried out by the South Wales Fire and Rescue Service, the force said.
"Storm Claudia has caused significant flooding in parts of Wales overnight, which continues to affect homes, businesses, transport and energy infrastructure," a spokesperson for the Welsh government said.
Natural Resources Wales has issued 11 flood warnings, four of which are severe, as well as 17 flood alerts.
In England, according to the Environment Agency's latest update, there were 49 active flood warnings and 134 flood alerts.
Armed police were called to Cefn Fforest in Blackwood, Wales, at around 7.15am on Thursday after being told two people were seriously injured.
Lainie Williams was pronounced dead at the scene, while a second, a 38-year-old woman, who also sustained injuries, has been discharged from hospital.
Gwent Police said 18-year-old Cameron Cheng, a British national from Newbridge, Caerphilly, has also been charged with possession of a bladed article in a public place.
He is remanded to appear before Newport Magistrates' Court on 17 November.
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Assistant Chief Constable Vicki Townsend said: "We understand that there has been a great deal of interest in this investigation.
"It is vital that people consider how their language, especially comments made online, could affect our ability to bring anyone found to have committed a criminal offence to justice.
"Even though we've reached this significant development in the investigation, our enquiries continue so it is likely that residents will continue to see officers in the area.
"So if anyone has any information, please speak to our officers or contact us in the usual way."
In the pavilions - warehouse-sized rooms chock full of stages, booths and people networking - the phrase "agentic AI" was everywhere.
There were AI agents that hung around your neck in jewellery, software to build agents into your workflows and more than 20 panel discussions on the topic.
Agentic AI is essentially artificial intelligence that can do specific tasks by itself, like book your flights or order an Uber or help a customer.
It's the industry's current buzzword and has even crept into the real world, with the Daily Mail listing "agentic" as an 'in' word for Gen Z last week.
But AI agents aren't new. In fact, Babak Hodjat, now chief AI officer at Cognizant, invented the technology behind one of the most famous AI agents, Siri, in the 1990s.
"Back then, the fact that Siri itself was multi-agentic was a detail that we didn't even talk about - but it was," he told Sky News from Lisbon.
"Historically, the first person that talked about something like an agent was Alan Turing."
New or not, AI agents are thought to come with even more risks than general-purpose AI, because they interact with and modify real-world scenarios.
The risks that come with AI, like bias in its data or unforeseen circumstances in how it interacts with humans, are magnified by agentic AI because it interacts with the world by itself
"Agentic AI introduces new risks and challenges," wrote the IBM Responsible Technology Board in their 2025 report on the technology.
"For example, one new emerging risk involves data bias: an AI agent might modify a dataset or database in a way that introduces bias.
"Here, the AI agent takes an action that potentially impacts the world and could be irreversible if the introduced bias scales undetected."
But for Mr Hodjat, its not AI agents we need to worry about.
"People are over-trusting [AI] and taking their responses on face value without digging in and making sure that it's not just some hallucination that's coming up.
"It is incumbent upon all of us to learn what the boundaries are, the art of the possible, where we can trust these systems and where we cannot, and educate not just ourselves, but also our children."
His warning will feel familiar, particularly in Europe, where there's an increased wariness around AI compared to the US.
But have we become too cautious when it comes to AI - at the risk of a far more existential threat in the future?
Jarek Kutylowski, chief executive of German AI language giant DeepL, certainly thinks so.
This year, the EU AI Act came into force, strict regulations about how companies can and can't use AI.
In the UK, companies are governed by existing legislation like GDPR and there's uncertainty about how strict our rules will be in the future.
When asked if we needed to slow down AI innovation in order to put stricter regulations in place, Mr Kutylowski said it was a question worth grappling with… but in Europe, we are taking it too far.
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"Looking at the apparent risks is easy, looking at the risks like what are we going to miss out on if we don't have the technology, if we are not successful enough in adopting that technology, that is probably the bigger risk," said Mr Kutylowski.
"I see definitely a much larger risk in Europe being left behind in the AI race."
"You won't see it until we start falling behind and until our economies cannot capitalise on those productivity gains that maybe other parts of the world will see.
"I do not believe personally that technological progress can be stopped in any way, so it is more of a question of 'how do we pragmatically embrace what is coming ahead?"