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Hello and welcome to Monday’s Evening Blend. This afternoon Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, delivered a statement to the House of Commons on her reforms to ‘earned settlement’.
What had been planned as sensible and electorally necessary changes to the indefinite leave to remain rules by Mahmood have turned into months of backstabbing and infighting as those on Labour’s left tried to have them watered down. The biggest point of contention has been the treatment of care workers.
On suggestions that new rules would lengthen the time migrants already here have to wait before applying for ILR, Angela Rayner said in March: ‘We cannot talk about earning a settlement if we keep moving the goalposts, because moving the goalposts undermines our sense of fair play. It’s un-British.’
In the end, Mahmood announced that settlement ‘should not be automatic, it should be earned’, which means anyone with a criminal record, a failure to speak English to a high standard, any debt to the UK taxpayer and a failure to pay three years of national insurance contributions will be automatically disqualified.
After that, the number of years you have to live in and contribute to the country depends on what you do. Those with salaries of more than £50,000 will be granted a five-year period, as will doctors, nurses and teachers and refugees who have arrived ‘via safe and legal routes’. Earn more than £125,000 and the time is cut to three years. Everyone else will have an extended window of ten years before they can apply for settlement.
There was then a capitulation on reforms to the social- and care-worker visa. Care workers who earn at least £25,000 and arrived in the UK before May last year also qualify for the five-year period, in a watering down of what Mahmood had originally been looking to do. No workers at all will have to wait 15 years, as had previously been reported.
Mahmood was keen to crack down on illegal migration and confirmed that anyone who has arrived on a small boat or by another illegal method will be disqualified from applying for settled status for 30 years (falling to 20 years if they work or study).
The Home Secretary has fought to hold on to the main principle of her reforms: that settlement should be more clearly linked to contribution, even if Rayner and the Labour left got their way on care workers.
In the end, though, as opposition MPs were quick to point out, these changes are unlikely to reverse the care-worker portion of the so-called ‘Boriswave’ of migration, potentially making it permanent even if the rules for future arrivals and illegal migrants are significantly tougher.
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