The Legal Advisers Helping Migrants Pose As Gay
Newscast
BBC
4.3 • 6.6K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, an undercover BBC investigation has found evidence of law firms and legal advisors helping migrants pretend to be gay to get asylum.
Migrants were advised to take staged photos at nightclubs, attend LGBT events and to go to GPs pretending to be depressed to obtain medical evidence to support their cases. Adam and Chris are joined by BBC politics investigation correspondent Billy Kenber, who uncovered the story.
In response to our findings, the Home Office said: "Anyone found trying to exploit the system will face the full force of the law, including removal from the UK."
Plus, Adam also checks in with Faisal, who’s in the US at the IMF’s annual conference. He fills us in on the indirect war of words between Rachel Reeves and her US counterpart, Scott Bessent.
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New episodes released every day. If you're in the UK, for more News and Current Affairs podcasts from the BBC, listen on BBC Sounds: https://bbc.in/4guXgXd Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. The presenter was Adam Fleming. It was made by Anna Harris with Shiler Mahmoudi. The social producer was Joe Wilkinson. The technical producer was Jonathan Greer. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The senior news editor is Sam Bonham.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.7 | Chris, I've come to the newscast studio in Westminster in person on a mission to bring you newscast of feedback to your reactions to the new opening titles. |
| 0:14.3 | Oh, well, it's very good of you to come down to, it feels nostalgic. |
| 0:16.8 | This is where we used to do our Thursday TV newscast, wasn't it, for years and years. |
| 0:20.2 | In a very small, hot room. Yes. So, Finley got in touch to say, hello newscast. I believe Chris missed out Ursula von der Leyen, Mark Rutter, and Adam himself saying, O'Lala. Were you in there? No, this is the thing. That's so obviously Leicesteretette. Which is what I thought it was hilarious that you thought it was me. Otherwise, maybe it's the sort of thing I would say. No, it's Lees Doucette, isn't it? Yeah. It's got a French thing. Yeah, yeah, no, no, yeah. Yeah. And the people who did correctly identify Lease include Peggy, Rebecca, Val, Bruce and Wendy. so well done to them. And well done to Finley as well. |
| 0:55.4 | I was quite proud of my performance, but it could have been better. Yeah, I think you've |
| 1:00.0 | probably got 75% of them. Yes, probably the easy 75%, but still. But every newscaster should |
| 1:05.1 | surely be able to get 100% this time. |
| 1:08.2 | Newscast. Newscast from the BBC. Humanity's next great voyage begins. We are in the midst of a rupture. Nostalgia will not bring back the old order. Six-seven. Yeah. It's supposed to be me as a doctor. There he has also a special connotation. Ooh la la la. Thinking about it like a panto helped. Do we play music now? What do we do? Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio, slowly getting used to the new celebrity lineup in our opening titles. Hearing it then, I still couldn't quite hear Lease, to be honest. I think maybe you and Lees need to be in the same studio, so we'll get her to do it for real. |
| 1:45.5 | Good idea. Good idea. |
| 1:47.0 | Right. Now, for something completely different. |
| 1:49.0 | We're going to dig into this BBC investigation release today, which has found a shadow industry of law firms and advisors charging thousands of pounds to help migrants pretend to be gay in order to stay in the UK using the UK's asylum system. And one of the journalists who's been working on this because it's been a team effort is Billy Camber and he's here. Hello, Billy. Hello. And we should give some credit to Phil Kemp, your colleague, who's also been working on this. Absolutely. Now, this is a very different kind of journalism from what I've ever done in my career. So I'm selfishly intrigued to just work at how you even go about starting an investigation |
| 2:20.6 | like this. |
| 2:21.2 | And we'll go into the details of the story in a second. |
| 2:23.1 | But just tell us a bit of your process. |
| 2:24.9 | So we started with a fact, really, with the fact that asylum claims were at record levels, |
| 2:31.7 | it topped 100,000 and that there have been a lot of focus on |
| 2:35.7 | small boats on people arriving illegally in the country and on the government's behalf trying |
| 2:40.7 | to stop the smugglers facilitating that passage, but much less focus on another big cohort of those |
| 2:46.7 | asylum claims, which is people that have come to the country legally on visas, on work, or student visas or as tourists, and then had entered a claim for asylum. And we had some |
| 2:55.6 | initial information that there was a particular issue with that group of fake claims being made, |
| 3:00.5 | and that they were being facilitated by advisers, not overseas, like the criminal gangs |
... |
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