‘We thought the Rwanda scheme was the worst of it’: Enver Solomon on leading – and leaving – the Refugee Council

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, is at his home in London when I meet him. It’s the start of a gruesome week. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has just announced that refugees could have their status revoked at any time if the country from which they fled is deemed safe; the pathway from being granted asylum to getting citizenship would increase to 20 years; AI would be used to establish a refugee’s age; and – a strikingly nasty idea – the jewellery of those arriving in the UK could be seized.

While media commentators puzzled over whether this would be enough red meat for Labour to see off Reform, this must surely have been a new low for Solomon? “There’s been lots of terrible weeks,” he says. “So I’m used to it.” He looks neat, open and determined, and his kitchen is incredibly yellow and cheerful, which I put down to sheer effort of will to look on the bright side.

“We thought Rwanda was the worst it had ever been,” he says. You remember Rwanda – former Conservative home secretary Priti Patel’s wheeze, where no one arriving on a small boat would ever get the right to settle in the UK, a scheme which cost £700m and deported four people to east Africa, all of them voluntarily. Then Solomon and his team worked in the Rotherham hotel where people were almost burned alive by a far-right mob in 2024. “People inside were livestreaming it to our staff … so there have been some pretty low points. It’s difficult to say this is the worst it’s ever been.”

View image in fullscreen Anti-migration protesters outside the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham, August 2024. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Nevertheless, he concedes that to hear this week’s plans from a Labour government, which people working in the refugee and asylum sector had hopes for, makes it “more of a letdown, more of a disappointment”. He mentions Alf Dubs’ radio appearance earlier this morning – the Labour peer who himself ran the Refugee Council in the early 90s, and came to Britain thanks to the Kindertransport, the series of rescue operations between 1938 and 1940 which brought most