Shabana Mahmood is expected to set out her final decisions on settlement rules to Parliament in the coming week, with the BBC reporting that her plan to make some lower-paid migrants wait 15 years for indefinite leave to remain is likely to be revised for most people currently working in social care.
The BBC, citing unnamed sources, said the Home Secretary's wider proposal to double the standard qualifying period from five to 10 years is still expected to go ahead as originally proposed, and that most other workers would face the longer wait. The Home Office has said it will not comment on the final decisions until they are presented to Parliament.
A change on that scale would amount to a partial retreat on the most contested element of a policy that has drawn opposition from more than 100 Labour MPs, trade unions and care providers, and which Angela Rayner described as "un-British" before her return to the cabinet as Housing Secretary. Any exemption has yet to be confirmed by the Home Office or No 10, and its scope has not been published.
Mahmood set out the proposals in a Commons statement on 20 November 2025, launching a consultation on what the government calls "earned settlement". She told MPs that "the starting point for settlement will move from 5 years to 10", and that lower-qualified workers who entered on the health and care visa, along with their dependants, should wait longer. "For that reason, we propose they should wait 15 years before they can earn settlement," she said.
The consultation closed on 12 February 2026. The Commons Home Affairs Committee has since reported that the Home Office "is planning to apply the changes set out in the Earned Settlement consultation to people who are already in the UK, with the potential for some transitional protections". People who already hold settlement, including those granted it under the Windrush and EU Settlement schemes, are not affected.
Giving evidence to the committee in September, Mahmood said: "Later this year we will set out the new policy on settlement, taking into account all the consultation responses we have had, as well as any transitional arrangements we might decide to implement."
Andy Burnham, the Prime Minister, told journalists on 23 October that decisions would come "soon". He added: "But I strongly support the home secretary when she says that settlement is a right to be earned through contribution, and that will be the principle that guides our reforms."
Rayner, speaking earlier this year at an event run by the campaign group Mainstream, said: "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." She also called the plans a "breach of trust".
Within the party, Tony Vaughan, the Labour MP for Folkestone and Hythe, co-ordinated a letter signed by more than 100 Labour MPs asking the government to rethink. Miatta Fahnbulleh, the Energy Secretary, criticised any attempt to "prolong the time people have to wait for settlement" in a social media post she later deleted, according to LBC. She subsequently said, of what she called a "light-hearted" remark to journalists: "I didn't get it right and it hasn't come off as I intended."
Pressure from the care sector intensified on Thursday, when 17 signatories including Care England, the Society of Radiographers, Baroness Lister and the Labour MPs Diane Abbott, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Clive Lewis and Rachael Maskell wrote to Mahmood and Yvette Cooper, the Health Secretary. The letter, as quoted by LBC, said: "The proposals are unfair: doubling the baseline qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain to 10 years and tripling this period to 15 years for care workers." It added: "Additionally, retrospective application for people already in the UK is punitive."
The Conservatives have already characterised any softening as a climbdown. A party spokesperson said in September: "Shabana Mahmood has caved in to pressure from Angela Rayner and her open borders MPs and will shred her own plans to reform indefinite leave to remain."
It remains unclear whether any exemption would extend to care workers' dependants or to new entrants on the health and care visa, what transitional arrangements will apply to those already in the UK, and on which day the statement will be made.
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