Shabana Mahmood has caved to her party’s worst instincts on immigration

Shabana Mahmood’s climbdown will cost taxpayers billions and entrench state overreach, says Rakib Ehsan While home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s climbdown over her settlement reforms will delight some within her own party, it will disappoint many who believed that the Burnham Government would address growing public concerns over sensitive matters of immigration, integration, and identity. Mahmood’s initial plans for migrant care workers already in the UK to wait 15 years for permanent settlement were previously labelled by former deputy prime minister and current housing secretary as “un-British”, with energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh hesitating to express support for the reforms in a recent interview.

Under the watered-down plans, if care workers earn at least £25,000 a year and entered the UK before May 2025, they will be eligible for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) after five years – sparing 282,000 migrants from delayed settlement. Quality and quantity The climbdown will not only reinforce public anxieties over the lack of quantity and quality control when it comes to the UK’s lax immigration system – it is likely to cost British taxpayers billions of pounds.

Having ILR, migrants gain a suite of rights and benefits, such as being able to work without restrictions and having access to public funds. Moving from ‘pre-settled status’ to having ILR means that migrants may become eligible to apply for social housing (on the grounds of meeting the council’s requirements based on length of residency in the local authority area and need). Migrants with ILR are exempt from paying the Immigration Health Surcharge (HIS), therefore entitled to free access to NHS hospital treatment on a similar basis to that of an ordinarily resident person.

A variety of welfare benefits are available with ILR (with conditions depending on the type of state assistance), as well as council tax reductions. Mahmood is currently refusing to specify how much scrapping her plan to make foreign care workers already in the UK wait longer to qualify for permanent settlement will cost. There is also the worry that reversing the decision to extend the period before migrant care workers qualify for ILR, means that the UK Government is unwilling to implement a comprehensive skills, training and pay strategy for the sector to make jobs more attractive for domestic workers.

As Policy Exchange argued in its Double Vision report in relation to medics, the UK must stop relying so heavily on overseas recruitment and should instead focus on finding ways to attract domestic workers into healthcare professions. The reality is that care roles are both mentally challenging and physically demanding. As it stands, British citizens who are entertaining entering the care professions are simply not provided with the training support, sufficient pay, and favourable working conditions they deserve – ultimately because the sector has been flooded with foreign care workers who are generally accepting of low wages and superficial rights.

There are also questions regarding the overall level of English language proficiency among migrant workers who arrived after the January 2021 post-Brexit liberalisation of visa rules – which in turn feeds into concerns over the quality of care for service users, especially elderly people who speak specific local dialects. The reckless internationalisation of care in the country is a national scandal. But there is a broader-picture problem here – what kind of state do we have and what type of society do we now live in?

One of the most pro-family measures any government could take is phasing out care visas completely. The sorry model of private care homes profiting from a cultural individualism where familial caring responsibilities are outsourced to cheap foreign labour should be rejected – especially by a Labour government with a supposedly socially conservative home secretary. Instead, it has now been consolidated by the state. The current government has missed a golden opportunity to send a signal that the UK is committed to a national care approach centred on a motivated domestic workforce and the encouragement of within-the-family support except for the very most serious mental and physical conditions.

Dr Rakib Ehsan is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange.