Mahmood to Set 10-Year Wait for Settlement for Most Migrants
The home secretary is due to publish new settlement rules on Monday. Most legal migrants would wait a decade, some 15 years, and MPs warn of staff shortages.
Legal migrants who want to settle permanently in the UK are about to face much longer waits. Home secretary Shabana Mahmood is due to announce the new rules on Monday, and MPs are warning about the effect on health and social care.
A decade for most, 15 years for some
Settlement, also called indefinite leave to remain, is the status that lets a migrant stay without time limits. The consultation plans would double the standard route to settlement from five years to 10. Some workers in jobs below graduate level, care workers among them, could face 15 years, subject to proposed exemptions and reductions.
Mahmood has proposed that the wait could be shortened. A migrant could show contributions to the local community through a points-based system, or earn a higher income. The government's response to the consultation goes before MPs on Monday.
Care workers and the doubts inside government
Several ministers, the housing secretary Angela Rayner among them, raised concerns about care workers already in the country, who would be likely to wait 15 years. The response is expected to give those workers some exemption. For most other professions the waits stay in place.
Rayner criticised the idea of making care workers already in Britain wait up to 15 years in June. Energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh said in September that her own family, refugees on arrival in Britain, would have found the plans tough.
It was reported in July that the prime minister, Andy Burnham, was weighing an exemption for hundreds of thousands of care workers to ease pressure on social care. Over five years the Home Office has issued about 200,000 visas to health and care workers, and many more people arrived with them as dependants.
A letter invoking Windrush
A letter to Mahmood and the health secretary, Yvette Cooper, dated 29 October, compares the proposals to Windrush-era policies. Its signatories include the Labour MPs Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Diane Abbott, Clive Lewis and Rachael Maskell, and the Green MPs Ellie Chowns, Carla Denyer, Siân Berry and Hannah Spencer. Groups backing it include the Work Rights Centre, Action for Race Equality, Care England and the Society of Radiographers.
In the Windrush scandal, mainly Black Britons with the right to live in Britain were wrongly detained and deported, and lost access to work and essential services. The signatories urge ministers to "stop history from repeating itself" by dropping the proposals or adding safeguards.
The signatories call it unfair to change the rules midway for people who planned around the old ones, and say essential workers might leave the country. They also say the proposed exemptions could leave out workers at independent health and care providers and the families of workers. Without more trained staff, they say, the government could struggle to hit cancer treatment and NHS waiting-list targets.
Mahmood is expected to meet union general secretaries on Monday to settle the final details. Some of them have raised alarm about the changes.
Our View
Mahmood has argued that settlement is "not a right but a privilege". The open question is how wide the care worker exemption turns out to be. If it does not reach staff at independent providers, the letter's warning about them will stay unanswered.
Source: The Guardian