Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood sets 10 to 15-year wait for UK settlement
Shabana Mahmood will announce new rules extending the wait for indefinite leave to remain for legal migrants, with most facing a decade and some up to 15 years, as MPs and care sector bodies warn of staff shortages.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will announce sweeping new rules on Monday that will require most legal migrants to wait around a decade before they can settle permanently in the UK, with some facing a wait of up to 15 years. The changes concern indefinite leave to remain, the status that allows people to live and work in Britain without time limits.
Ministers, including the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, had raised concerns about the impact the proposals would have on care workers already in the country. Under the plans, care workers would be likely to face a 15-year wait for settlement, a prospect that has alarmed people working across the health and social care system.
MPs have warned that the rules risk creating staff shortages in health and social care. Critics have also described the policy as risking a second Windrush scandal, a reference to the treatment of Caribbean-born long-term residents who were wrongly denied rights in the UK after the 2010s immigration crackdown.
The Royal College of Nursing, whose head has urged Mahmood to shield migrant care staff from the plans, has pressed for an exemption for those already working in the sector. Its leadership has argued that the measures are illogical and unfair to staff who are central to care services.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp has separately criticised an expected dilution of Mahmood's plans to tighten immigration rules, suggesting that the government's final position may fall short of the original tightening. Reporting ahead of the announcement indicated that the Home Secretary's proposals were subject to ongoing negotiation within government.
The announcement comes as the government seeks to reduce net migration while maintaining the workforce that public services depend on. How the final rules treat existing care workers, and whether exemptions are granted, will determine the scale of the impact on staffing across the health and social care sectors.
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