HOME Secretary Shabana Mahmood stepped up Labour’s attack on immigrant workers yesterday, extending the wait for permanent settlement from the current five years to 10, with some lower-paid workers facing a 15-year wait.
Indefinite leave to remain (ILR), also known as settlement, gives a person the right to live, work and study in the UK for as long as they like and apply for benefits if they are eligible. They can also use it to apply for British citizenship.
Several Labour MPs raised concerns about the impact of the proposals on migrants already living here, describing the retrospective approach as ‘un-British’.
They also warned it could worsen the UK’s skills shortage, particularly in the care sector.
PM Andy Burnham reinforced the attack last week, claiming that settlement is a ‘right to be earned, not just granted automatically’.
Burnham claimed that legal migration has ‘come right down,’ adding: ‘I think when you have planned migration, it’s difficult to say is it too high or too low, because it’s got to be, if you like, following gaps in the economy.
‘Because if you just put a number on it, then we may have a shortage in a certain area.’
Mahmood has claimed new ant-migrant barriers are required to avoid a ‘drain on our public finances’.
Mahmood wrote: ‘An attempt to fill between 6,000 and 40,000 jobs saw the arrival of 616,000 individuals from 2022 to 2024. Over half were not even arriving to work in that sector but were instead dependents of those who were.’
Former Home Office Minister Mike Tapp said: ‘I very much hope that those who are genuinely working in health and social care for five years are exempt from that retrospective extension to the time they need to be here before they apply for settlement.
‘We’ve all known someone in our family or friends who has been cared for by these people, so that would be the right thing to do.’
In June, Mahmood asked Starmer to sack Tapp after he wrote an article arguing that foreign care workers should be exempt from the changes to ILR.
