Labour is preparing to double the standard wait for permanent residence from five to ten years, while proposing shorter waits for migrants on higher incomes. Some workers in occupations classed as below graduate level, including care workers, could face fifteen years, subject to exemptions and reductions.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood is expected to put the government’s response to its settlement consultation before MPs on Monday. Alongside reductions for higher earners, she has suggested shortening the wait for migrants who score points for contributing to their local communities.
Launching the consultation last year, Mahmood declared: “To become a part of this country, permanently, is therefore not a right but a privilege – and one that must be earned.”
Care workers don’t become more useful to society when an employer pays them more, or less useful when an employer pays them less. Yet ministers propose using earnings to help decide who deserves to settle sooner. They would turn employers’ pay scales into a test of belonging. Workers on lower wages could pay twice: first in their living standards, then in the extra years they spend without permanent status.
For people already in Britain, ministers could also change the terms after they’ve built their lives around them. Workers who planned for settlement after five years could find themselves facing a much longer wait. Their families would have to live with the consequences of a government rewriting the rules halfway through.
Employers can press workers harder when those workers have both their income and their future in the country to worry about. By prolonging that insecurity, ministers would help bosses maintain a more vulnerable section of the workforce. Workers born in Britain have no interest in employers gaining that advantage.
The government is expected to offer some exemption to care workers already here, following concerns from ministers and unions. The Home Office has granted about 200,000 health and care worker visas over the past five years, with many more people arriving as dependants. Mahmood is also due to meet union general secretaries on Monday, some of whom have raised the alarm over the changes.
But an exemption for selected workers wouldn’t settle the question for everyone else. In a letter dated 29 October, MPs, migrant organisations, racial equality campaigners and health professionals warned that exemptions for public-service workers could leave out staff employed by independent health and care providers, as well as workers’ family members. A care worker’s need for a secure home doesn’t change with the name of their employer.
The signatories include Labour MPs Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Green MPs, the Work Rights Centre, Action for Race Equality, Care England and the Society of Radiographers. They warn that workers may leave rather than accept the new terms, with consequences for services already struggling to retain staff.
On adult social care, their letter states: “International workers are essential to maintaining current levels of care. Without them, services will contract, and unmet need will increase.”
They also warn that ministers could undermine their own cancer treatment and NHS waiting-list targets by driving away internationally trained staff, including radiographers. Patients and people who need care would bear the consequences alongside migrant workers and their families.
Britain’s rulers draw on labour and skills from abroad to keep services running at home, then demand further proof that the people supplying them deserve a permanent place here. They expect workers to meet Britain’s needs while reserving the right to postpone those workers’ security.
Housing secretary Angela Rayner has described making care workers already here wait fifteen years as “un-British”. The letter’s signatories point to a distinctly British precedent, describing the proposals as “an iteration of Windrush era policies”. During the Windrush scandal, authorities wrongly detained and deported mainly Black Britons and denied them work and essential services despite their right to live in the country.
The signatories write: “Windrush was a scandal borne from racist immigration policies … this situation is not historic when this same wrong persists, and the same groups are targeted by current immigration proposals.”
The care-worker exemption under discussion exposes the government’s own contradiction. Ministers are considering concessions because they fear these workers will leave. They already know what migrant workers contribute: they’re counting on them to keep services running. They want the labour to continue while the people providing it wait for security.
