IPPR said the original plans would never create a £10bn long-term saving
UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is due to set out revisions to the rules governing legal migrants seeking settled status. The announcement comes as politicians dispute what constitutes fairness, how long affected groups should wait for settled status and whether the fiscal estimates support tighter controls.
Mason placed the debate amid high levels of legal immigration in recent years and Reform UK’s prominence in the national political conversation. He said both factors contributed to Labour wanting to be seen taking public concern about the scale of arrivals seriously. Iain Watson reported over the weekend that political opponents interpreted the revision of parts of Mahmood’s original plan as “weakness and retreat.”
Mahmood’s original proposal applied more stringent controls before qualification for settled status to migrants on lower wages who bring non-working dependants and children. She said the group was likely to present significant fiscal costs to the UK. Under the current rules, she said, “they will usually qualify for benefits payments and council housing five years after arrival.”
Because most members of the group began arriving from 2022 onward, Mahmood said the five-year eligibility point for benefits and council housing was due to begin in 2027. The consultation proposed a separate baseline qualifying period of 15 years for the group.
Mahmood said last year, in 2025, that she felt compelled to act because “between 2021 and 2024, we have seen net migration of an additional 2.6 million people. Around one in every 30 people in this country today arrived in these four years.” Critics labelled the increase “the Boriswave,” a reference to changes made under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Mahmood also argued that action was urgent because significant numbers of recent arrivals would soon start qualifying for indefinite leave to remain.
In November 2025, Mahmood announced a plan called “a fairer pathway to settlement.” The consultation sought opinions on her instincts. Mason said around 200,000 people contributed and that, as he had been told, 140,000 responses came from visa holders themselves.
One Whitehall source called the exercise “a colossal exercise and a genuine one” and claimed, “We have taken the time to get this right.” Mason asked whether the government had instead buckled under political pressure from its own side and a change of prime minister.
Critics within Labour and beyond the party cited fairness, or a perceived lack of it, in mounting their criticisms. In March, before returning to government, Angela Rayner, now the Housing Secretary, called the ideas “un-British” because they involved “moving the goalposts.” She said migrants who had arrived in good faith under one set of rules would have their future in the UK determined by new ones.
A few weeks before Rayner’s intervention, Mahmood defended the proposal at the centre-left IPPR think tank. She said, “in just four years, this country experienced levels of migration it had previously seen across four decades,” and added, “It was not just the scale, but also the nature of that change that was so destabilising.”
Mahmood also said, “We have never, in the history of this country, had so much low-skilled migration in so little time.” Based on findings from the Migration Advisory Committee, she estimated the lifetime cost to taxpayers would be £10bn and said working people would pay it. She called the proposal “an affront to the idea of fairness within our migration system.”
Mason wrote that the £10bn figure is contested by some, or at least placed in a wider context. The centre-left IPPR think tank disputed the fiscal framing. IPPR argued that the original plans were “never in reality going to create a £10bn long-term saving” because they were meant to delay care workers’ eligibility for indefinite leave to remain rather than prevent them from settling altogether. IPPR said delaying eligibility could save money on welfare, while the £10bn figure included broader long-run costs once care workers entered retirement, claimed the state pension and made greater use of health and social care.
Mason said Mahmood’s March message left senior Conservatives privately agreeing with her and struck by her willingness to take an unflinching approach to migration. Around 100 of her Labour colleagues were unhappy with the proposal and made their views known publicly.
By the time of his May interview at a sports club near Wigan, changes to the policy were highly likely, Mason wrote. By-election candidate Andy Burnham told him it was important to “work hard to get the balance right,” but that the “broad thrust” of the home secretary’s approach “is right.” Mason said the phrase “broad thrust” would account for the gap between what Mahmood used to say and what she was saying now.
The Conservatives and others were considering how the government would make the changes. They believe that if primary legislation is not used, such as an amendment to the Immigration and Asylum Bill before Parliament, the plans could be successfully challenged in court. One senior figure described the revisions to Mason as an “excruciating U-turn” and said they would be “deeply personally embarrassing” for Mahmood.
Mahmood has said her parents came to the UK from rural Kashmir decades ago. Mason described Mahmood, the daughter of immigrants, as responsible for reshaping the settlement system that brought her parents here, in a way that both her party and the country regarded as fair. At the Labour Party conference in September, she said: “Fair to those who seek a new and better life here, like my parents did. And fair to those already here, including British workers, and especially the young.”
A BBC report published on 22 October said Fahnbulleh backed Mahmood on migration after comments to journalists. Mahmood will argue that she has tried to arrive at a policy the widest range of people may see as fair. Mason said political and public reactions were expected in the coming hours and days.