UK May Revisit Plan to Make Foreigners Wait for Resident Status

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood hinted that the government is rethinking some of the most controversial elements of her immigration reforms, as Prime Minister Andy Burnham attempts to defuse simmering tensions over the plans within his party.

Mahmood has faced a backlash from Labour MPs over her bid to make legal migrants wait 10 instead of five years to claim settled status, even while the timeline can be reduced to as few as two years for those who are well paid or “contribute” to their community. Those changes were due to take effect later this year.

“Some have said elements of these reforms are not fair,” Mahmood said on the second day of Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool. “Let me say this: we will come to a position that balances fairness for those who came here legally, and fairness to British citizens across this country.”

It marked the first time Mahmood has made a public speech since Burnham took over from Keir Starmer as prime minister in July. With Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party advancing in the polls and increasing the salience of migration among UK voters, Mahmood propose a tightening of the UK’s immigration rules when she was appointed by Starmer this time last year.

Burnham has tried to shift the conversation away from that territory. In the first two months of his premiership Mahmood has been kept out of the limelight, and not assumed her usual prominence in the government’s broadcast rota.

A spokesperson for the home secretary declined to comment.

Many in the Labour Party objected to the way that the plans to extend the settlement timeline would apply retroactively to people already resident, who could also end up waiting longer in pursuit of settled status.

Tensions between those changes and the Labour party’s wider plans under Burnham were evident on the first day of Labour’s annual gathering on Sunday.

Burnham said he wants to shake up the UK’s adult social care sector. But that industry’s workforce is heavily reliant on migrants, who risk losing their right to remain in the country when salary thresholds for work visas rise next year.

Many who arrived to fill vacancies in the aftermath of Brexit would have been able to get around that rise by claiming settled status in the coming months, but Mahmood’s proposed changes could make some wait as long as 15 years.

Speaking to Bloomberg on the fringes of the conference on Sunday, one senior Labour figure said the changes posed a “real problem” for the care sector.

The person said two different arms of government — the Home Office and the Department for Health — were in conflict with each other, both pursuing their own agendas, and that more cross-government collaboration was needed.

Neil Duncan Jordan, a left-leaning Labour MP, called for the government to drop its proposed changes to settled status for care workers at a fringe event on Sunday. “You can’t fix social care if you start getting rid of thousands of workers under the new settled status proposals,” Duncan Jordan said in a Bloomberg interview. “The PM needs to recognize that this has to change.”

Mahmood also announced on Monday that from October, the government would open applications for charities to start sponsoring refugees to come to the UK through new safe and legal routes. Around a quarter will be Afghan women and girls, she said, and Palestinians fleeing Gaza.

The government expects the number of arrivals under these routes to start in the hundreds, before rising into the low thousands as irregular migration falls. A cap will be set each year, she said.