3 Nov 2026 - 7:00am
Shabana Mahmood has bottled it on immigration reform, and the country will pay. After a year of talking tough on immigration reform, the Home Secretary’s address to Parliament on Monday afternoon shows she has discovered that words are easier than action when faced with a stubborn Labour Party which refuses to make difficult but necessary decisions.
Mahmood’s original proposals from last year doubled the standard wait for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) from five years to 10, with a 15-year baseline for lower-skilled workers including carers. The urgency was obvious: net migration added 2.6 million people to Britain’s population between 2021 and 2024. The “Boriswave” was approaching settlement, bringing access to benefits and social housing at a massive cost to the UK taxpayer.
Then came the rebellion. In March, Mahmood’s party colleague Angela Rayner denounced retrospective changes as “un-British” (just like underpaying Stamp Duty, some might say). Labour MPs demanded concessions. When Andy Burnham became prime minister, his decision to retain Mahmood suggested he supported the Home Secretary’s approach. Clearly, that support had limits.
Under the revised framework, the 15-year baseline has disappeared. Care workers who entered or switched into the route before May 2025 retain a five-year pathway if they meet salary, sponsorship, employment and strengthened settlement requirements. The salary threshold is £25,000. Officials estimate that roughly 146,000 workers and 136,000 dependants could benefit.
It’s an embarrassing retreat for Mahmood. In March, she warned that failing to act would produce a “drain on our public finances”. Home Office calculations estimated a £9.5 billion net lifetime fiscal cost for care workers and their adult dependants expected to settle between 2026 and 2030 — around £36,000 per worker and £67,000 per adult dependant across their lifetimes. Because of Mahmood’s cowardice, taxpayers are back on the hook for billions of pounds of welfare spending just to plug a current hole in the care system.
The workforce justification is equally unsatisfactory — this is a sticking plaster response. Settlement frees workers from immigration sponsorship, so once the five years are up most workers will hand in their resignation and find a new job. And then we’ll be back to square one, and the Labour Left will be crying out for even more migrants to fill the gaps left by those who came over in the Boriswave (who will now sit back and claim housing benefits and universal credit).
Labour seems remarkably uninterested in those second-order effects. It celebrates protecting the workforce without explaining how its policy will retain that workforce. Meanwhile, domestic workers remain trapped in a sector whose recruitment problems reflect poor pay, difficult conditions and limited progression. Overseas recruitment reduces the pressure to fix those failings, keeping wages artificially low for domestic workers and contributing to the high level of churn in the industry. It is not clear how this fits with Burnham’s promise for growth in every postcode.
Alongside taxpayers and domestic care workers, service users might also lose out if overseas recruitment becomes a substitute for rigorous checks, training and supervision. The evidence from medicine is troubling. A Telegraph analysis earlier this year found that overseas-trained doctors accounted for 55.6% of proven misconduct cases, despite comprising roughly 42% of the medical workforce. NHS Resolution separately found that doctors trained outside Britain and the European Economic Area had 1.8 times the rate of performance-concern cases compared with UK graduates. The Government’s compassion must extend to the vulnerable people receiving care, whose safety depends on getting those standards right, not just plugging gaps and winning over the Left of the Labour Party.
Like the welfare retreat last year, this exposes a government unable to sustain difficult choices against pressure from its own benches. Ministers announce savings and stronger rules, then colleagues mobilise to carve out exceptions. The taxpayer is expected to applaud the compassion and absorb the consequences. Reform UK and the Conservatives have been handed an obvious attack line: Labour talks tough until its MPs object. The Tories deserve blame for creating the immigration surge. Labour will deserve blame for refusing to confront its consequences. Rayner and her allies can celebrate their victory, while the rest of us await the bill.
