Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has refused to say how much it will cost to drop her plan forcing foreign care workers already in Britain to wait longer for permanent settlement. She insisted that the reworked rules will still save billions.
Under changes she announced Monday, care workers who arrived before May 2025 and earn at least £25,000 a year keep a five-year route to settlement, as do some other groups. Those who miss the cutoff can apply for a new five-year visa and then seek settlement.
The shift cuts the number of people facing a delayed path to permanent residency to just over 500,000. Before Monday, the figure stood at almost 800,000.
Mahmood's first proposal, a response to record post-Brexit net migration under the last Conservative government, would have doubled the standard qualifying period to a decade. Some migrants would have faced 15 years. The Home Office had suggested that approach could save £10bn.
Competing claims over savings
Mahmood said the savings would accrue largely to the Department for Work and Pensions, because workers in other sectors still face longer waits and fewer people would claim benefits. She said detailed costs will be published when her department brings the changes before Parliament.
She argued that the group most likely to depend on the state was care workers who are not currently doing care work. Under the new rules, she said, they will not settle at five years and will get another chance to contribute.
That will now not happen because they will not be settling at five years – those individuals get a second chance to make that contribution that they originally came to make
Shabana Mahmood, home secretary
Home Office minister Anna Turley estimated welfare savings of at least £1bn over the next couple of years and said officials would do more calculations on the total. The Conservatives, who branded the move a U-turn, said it would cost the country billions.
The £10bn figure was based on a Migration Advisory Committee estimate of what an average migrant care worker costs in benefits and public services over a lifetime. The Institute for Public Policy Research has challenged it, finding that current settlement rules add £115bn to the UK's public finances.
Public debate has focused heavily on the costs of recent migration, but this is not the whole story,
Marley Morris, IPPR associate director
Pressure inside Labour
Mahmood denied she had reversed course, describing the outcome of a public consultation as a package that strikes the right balance. She would not say whether Prime Minister Andy Burnham told her to change direction; she first unveiled the proposals in November under his predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer.
Applying the rules retroactively to workers already in the UK drew criticism within Labour. Housing Secretary Angela Rayner said it amounted to changing the goalposts, while several MPs called the approach un-British and warned it could worsen skills shortages, especially in care.
The Home Office expects about 1.9 million people to settle in the UK between 2026 and 2030. Settlement, formally indefinite leave to remain, allows holders to live, work and study in the country indefinitely, claim benefits if eligible and apply for citizenship.
