The home secretary wanted to double the wait for settlement, also known as indefinite leave to remain (ILR), to 10 years for new arrivals, as well as retrospectively for those who came in the post-Brexit wave. Some lower-paid migrants, including care workers, would have to wait 15 years.
The proposals caused controversy. Unions described the plans for retrospective changes for much-needed care workers as “cruel and unconscionable”.
A year later the political context is very different. Andy Burnham has succeeded Starmer, and the threat posed to Labour by Reform has receded significantly, while net migration is plummeting. But migration remains a top concern for voters, and YouGov polling released yesterday found that nearly half of Britons support extending the waiting period for legal migrants before they are granted ILR.
Meantime, the criticism of Mahmood’s plans has only become more vocal. In June, while still on the backbenches before her promotion back to cabinet, Angela Rayner said the care worker proposal was “un-British”. In September, the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, said the plans would have been “tough” for her family, who came to Britain as refugees.
And last weekend, the Guardian reported on a letter signed by parliamentarians alongside campaigners and health professionals describing the proposals as “an iteration of Windrush era policies”.
Ahead of the statement, there were reports of up to 100 Labour MPs ready to rebel if Mahmood didn’t soften her original proposals – though quite how is unclear, because she doesn’t require a vote on primary legislation to put through these changes.
What are the new rules?
In the event, no rebellion was necessary. While Mahmood has tightened the rules on ILR significantly, doubling the standard wait to qualify to 10 years, she scrapped her planned 15 year wait for lower-paid workers.
As Rajeev sets out in this helpful explainer, under pressure from health unions, the home secretary offered a carve-out for care workers, allowing an estimated 280,000 and their dependents to apply for ILR after five years.
Faster routes will be available for highest band taxpayers, for example, and some public service workers including doctors, nurses and teachers. But, as Rajeev points out, thousands of lower-paid workers will still face the shock of having to wait a decade before being able to apply to settle in the UK, despite being told when they first arrived the wait was five years. The changes will mean half a million people face longer waits for settled status.
“The new rules also place particularly stringent requirements for settlement on refugees,” Rajeev tells me – with those entering via small boat set to wait up to 30 years for permanent settlement and those claiming asylum having entered the country legally waiting a decade. The Refugee Council condemned the plans as “unfair and unworkable” and likely to harm refugee integration. The Law Society went further, suggesting the new rules contravene the Refugee Convention.
The exception will be the small number of refugees who enter through designated safe and legal routes like the scheme for Afghan women and girls and Palestinians.
Who are the workers affected?
Both Zack Polanski and Kemi Badenoch, politicians at either end of the political spectrum, have dismissed care work as “wiping bottoms” in recent years. There’s a crude assumption that, because it is poorly paid, it must demand minimal effort. But I know from my own family’s experience of social care about the patience, skill and humanity involved in this kind of work.
It was the prospect of even more overwhelming uncertainty that people found so crushing, Chris Osuh tells me. He has been interviewing care workers around Manchester about their professional conditions since the changes were first mooted: “When somebody’s waiting for settlement, the uncertainty never goes away”. And the practical reality is that during this waiting period individuals are still paying out visa costs on top of taxes, while their career ambitions and earning capacity may be limited because some jobs are contingent on having secured ILR. “Basically it makes your life a lot more precarious for longer.”
It’s worth reiterating that these changes affect people who’ve arrived legally in the UK through pathways intended to help British people. “You’re doing vital, hard, underpaid work where there are huge skill shortages”, he says. It’s also the case that some care workers find themselves tied to exploitative employers by strict visa arrangements, something Mahmood acknowledged yesterday when she introduced safety nets for those exploited by “rogue sponsors”.
Data suggests 19% of the care workforce are non-EU citizens, and many come from places such as Nigeria, Ghana and broader sub-Saharan Africa. As the prime minister opens dialogue around apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, it’s hard not to see this as “a continuation of an exploitative relationship”, adds Chris. “Once again, Britain looks to all those countries that it once colonised to replace the labour that was lost during Brexit”.
The politics
Even before Mahmood stood up to make her statement, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, was accusing her of surrendering to “the open-borders Labour left” while Nigel Farage, whose Reform UK party wants to get rid of ILR completely, claimed she was “losing the fight with the far left”.
Unions representing care workers welcomed the concessions yesterday evening, while care sector bosses expressed relief that they weren’t about to lose a whole tranche of their workforce. But Rajeev cautions against reading these compromises purely as capitulation to Unison, one of Labour’s biggest financial backers, or to avoid cabinet rancour.
“If you look at the plans as a whole,” he tells me, “aside from the compromise around care workers, this still amounts to a radical hardening of policy that she has pushed through. And Andy Burnham supports it because he wants to win back the ‘red wall’.”
“This is about fairness in a system that Burnham’s already expressed a very personal interest in,” says Rajeev. Burnham has repeatedly praised the dedication of care home staff who looked after his father, Roy, before his death in September. But Burnham has also reiterated that his version of fairness is one that passes the Makerfield test.
As our political editor Pippa Crerar puts it in this analysis, the prime minister regards migration as a means to show people who’ve lost faith in politics that the government is prepared to listen and act. The next challenge for Mahmood is to convince the public of exactly that.
The home secretary rowed back on rules for care workers to allow them to apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years. Photograph: Maskot/Getty Images
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