Mahmood to set out changes to settlement rules for legal migrants

Image source, Reuters

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is set to announce changes to legal migration policy in the House of Commons on Monday

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will announce her final decision on changes to immigration rules on Monday.

Mahmood proposed extending the wait for permanent settlement from the current five years to 10, with some lower-paid migrants facing a 15-year wait, in response to a period of high net migration.

But she faced criticism for proposing to apply the changes to migrant workers already in the UK, with Housing Secretary Angela Rayner saying this would “change the goalposts”.

The BBC understands the proposals are likely to be revised for most of those currently working in social care. The Conservatives said Mahmood had “capitulated control of immigration policy” to Rayner.

Many lower-paid social care workers were facing a wait of up to 15 years rather than five.

The home secretary is expected to announce her final decision in a statement to MPs in the House of Commons.

Indefinite leave to remain (ILR), also known as settlement, gives a person the right to live, work and study in the UK for as long as they like and apply for benefits if they are eligible. They can also use it to apply for British citizenship.

Mahmood announced plans to delay settlements in response to concerns over the number of people approaching eligibility, in the wake of record post-Brexit net migration figures under the previous Conservative government.

The Home Office has said its figures show net migration – the difference between those entering and leaving the country – added 2.6m people to the UK population between 2021 and 2024.

The department forecast around 1.6m people could therefore settle between 2026 and 2030.

More than 200,000 responses were submitted to the consultation on Mahmood’s proposals, which were launched under former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

Several Labour MPs raised concerns about the impact of the proposals on migrants already living here, describing the retrospective approach as “un-British”.

They also warned it could worsen the UK’s skills shortage, particularly in the care sector.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said last week that settlement is a “right to be earned, not just granted automatically”.

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Mahmood has argued reforms are required to avoid a “drain on our public finances”.

In her foreword to the consultation, Mahmood said the bar to entry to the UK was “lowered significantly” and this was “most evident in the health and care visa”.

She wrote: “An attempt to fill between 6,000 and 40,000 jobs saw the arrival of 616,000 individuals from 2022 to 2024.

“Over half were not even arriving to work in that sector but were instead dependants of those who were.”

Home Office calculations suggested 196,000 care workers and their adult dependants could settle between 2026 and 2030, at an estimated lifetime cost of £9.5bn to taxpayers.

On Monday, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank said that skilled workers and their dependants due to settle in the UK under current rules are expected to make a net lifetime contribution of around £115bn through the taxes they pay.

Former Home Office Minister Mike Tapp told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I very much hope that those who are genuinely working in health and social care for five years are exempt from that retrospective extension to the time they need to be here before they apply for settlement.

“We’ve all known someone in our family or friends who has been cared for by these people, so that would be the right thing to do.”

In June, Mahmood had asked Sir Keir to sack Tapp after he wrote an unauthorised article arguing that foreign care workers should be exempt from the changes to ILR.

Dr Ben Brindle, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, said that “at the broader level [the policy] probably won’t have too much impact” on people’s decision to come to the UK.

“Immigration policy acts as more of a barrier than anything,” he told Today.

Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp said: “By Mahmood’s own admission in a speech this March, letting low wage care workers alone stay forever will cost taxpayers £10bn and be an ‘affront’.

“Now she looks likes she’s about to do exactly that.”

Meanwhile, Reform UK home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf said Mahmood had been “overruled” by Burnham, which was “a disaster for Britain”. He added that Reform would abolish ILR altogether.

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