George Thomas

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has set out the non-negotiable foundations of “Earned Settlement”: • No criminal record • English to a high standard • No unpaid debt to the British taxpayer • At least three years of National Insurance contributions As she put it: “This is the foundation of settlement. The non-negotiable expectations that we make of who seeks to live here permanently.” This is basic common sense. It’s extraordinary that a clean record, speaking the language, and not being a drain on the taxpayer weren’t already the absolute minimum. Yet the same Home Secretary has been forced into a humiliating climbdown on the tougher rules that were supposed to sit on top of those foundations. Under pressure from Angela Rayner and more than 100 Labour MPs, she scrapped the plan to make lower-skilled migrants wait 15 years for permanent settlement, cutting it to ten. For the foreign care workers who arrived in the post-Covid surge under Boris Johnson, she went further, revealing thousands will now be able to settle after just five years rather than the proposed 15, provided they meet certain conditions. This is the Boriswave becoming the Burnham burden. Mahmood herself previously warned that care workers and their adult dependants expected to settle by 2030 could cost taxpayers a staggering £10 billion over their lifetimes. More than 616,000 visas were issued through the Health and Care route between 2022 and 2024, including dependants. Official estimates suggest around 146,000 care workers and 136,000 dependants could benefit from the concession. The country did not ask for this. It will cause uproar, and Reform, Restore and the Conservatives who opened the door in the first place will rightly make political capital from it. Once again, politicians are ignoring the clear will of the people.