In the May 2025 Immigration White Paper, the government announced sweeping changes to settlement rules that would place over one million people into decades of insecurity. As of August 2026, six months have passed since the closing of the public consultation into these changes, and people who may be affected have endured well over a year of waiting in fear and anxiety. We have only rumours and speculation to go on to understand what the future of the earned settlement policy looks like. 

In the meantime what has become clear is that: 

  • The financial justification for earned settlement has been shown to be unsound: the policy will not meet the government’s stated intentions 
  • Earned settlement is at odds with the Prime Minister’s other priorities including ending homelessness, reducing child poverty and creating a social care service. 

What do we know?  

The plans as written in the consultation 
The headline policy in the public consultation was an increase from 5 to 10 years as the baseline route to settlement for most people on visas in the UK. But this is far from the full story: 

  • some people could be barred from ever being granted indefinite leave to remain, due to the introduction of new minimum income and stricter English language requirements – they could forever be in limbo no matter how long they are in the UK 
  • several penalties are proposed which would add 5, 10 or even 20 years to settlement routes, including penalties for arriving on a visitor visa or claiming benefits which people are legally entitled to  
  • for people who are in jobs which do not require a degree, the wait for settlement would be 15 years, rather than 10. This includes hundreds of thousands of care workers as well as many others. 
  • the government was clear that it intended these measures to apply to people who are already on routes to settlement (as well as everyone newly entering onto them in the future).  This includes people who are on routes to settlement which are already over the 5-year baseline. With penalties for claiming benefits, this could mean people who are already in the UK on a ten-year route to settlement now seeing their wait doubled. 

What happened to the consultation? 

The public consultation on earned settlement closed in February. The questions were difficult to answer, often biased in favour of the proposals, but that didn’t stop over 200,000 people and organisations responding, including groups with lived experience like the VOICE. The government says that the consultation responses are still being worked through and this is why the changes, originally intended to come into force in April 2026, have been delayed, possibly until the autumn. 

Have any changes been made already? 

Most of the changes to the immigration rules which will make up the earned settlement policy have not been made yet, with one exception. The new English language requirement for settlement applications has been changed in the rules, and this will come into force in 2027.  

There is a related but separate change to settlement for refugees, changing 5 years refugee status to 2.5 years “core protection” and the standard route to settlement from 5 years to 20 years. The new shorter “core protection” leave has already come into force for people claiming asylum after 2 March 2026. This is not part of the earned settlement proposals, and no changes to length of routes to settlement on immigration (not asylum) routes have been made. 

What will happen next?  

In short, we don’t know. There have been a number of media reports that changes may be made to the plans after a huge consultation response and a lot of public concern, raised up by MPs who wrote to stand against the proposals. 

Exemption for care workers? 

There are media reports of an exemption from earned settlement for current care workers. This would be a step in the right direction, a huge win for hundreds of thousands of workers after a long fight and a necessity if the Prime Minister’s ambitions for social care are to be achieved. If this concession was made it would also remove the Home Secretary’s justification for introducing these policies altogether. Shabana Mahmood has made clear that her justification for the policy as a whole rests on applying longer routes to settlement for people on health and care worker visas because of the unfounded and debunked claimed it would be “a £10 billion drain on public finances”.  

If there is (rightly) no longer any appetite for the policy to apply to health and social care visa holders, by extension there is no justification for the policy at all. 

No recourse to public funds (NRPF) 

Media reports have also suggested that an exemption for care workers may come alongside a change to indefinite leave to remain (ILR) conditions, imposing NRPF on people granted ILR for some period of time. This would represent another huge betrayal of people who have worked and waited for years to be secure. The public safety net will only work to keep people safe if it is there for everyone. We learnt this during the pandemic. As uncoupling ILR from recourse to public funds requires changes to primary legislation, it could also have significant unforeseen future consequences. 

Retrospective application 

If the retrospectivity of these proposals was scrapped altogether (as some media reports suggest), this would be a further step in the right direction. People who have spent the last year in anxiety would breathe a sigh of relief that life wasn’t about to get much harder for much longer. But the government would be tying itself to a completely unworkable system for all future new applicants starting routes to settlement. It is wrong on principle for people to be made to wait 10, 15, 20 years or even be unable to settle altogether, trapped in a cycle of falling out of status and paying extortionate fees to get it back. It will also decimate sectors like social care and universities which will find it harder to recruit and keep desperately needed staff,  and will damage our future neighbours and their children’s chances of settling and flourishing in cohesive communities, leaving local communities and place-based services to provide.  

Impact on our place 

We have a good deal of evidence about what long routes do to people from ours and other’s work with people on the ten-year route to settlement. Earned settlement could impact up to one in ten residents of Greater Manchester. In our communities, we know that this would mean: 

More destitution and child poverty  

  • People will be pushed into financial hardship and debt caused by unaffordable fees. 
  • They will face the impossible decision of whether to claim benefits they need and are entitled to, which would mean extending their route to settlement to 15 or 20 years. We are already seeing people choose not to claim the public funds they desperately need due to the fear these proposals have caused. 
  • The risk of being pushed out of status altogether will be increased by having to spend a decade or longer on an insecure route with risk every time they have to renew their visa. Losing status means losing the right to work, rent, and access healthcare. 
    One person told us “I’m so worried that I will keep on falling off this pathway to settlement so I will never attain the right to live in the UK permanently… Any break in my leave has such catastrophic consequences”.  

A future Windrush-style scandal 

  • There are echoes of the Windrush scandal in the way impact will fall along racial lines, disproportionately affecting black and brown people (see IPPR’s anaylsis). 
  • Leaving people with permanently insecure status makes them more vulnerable to a future far-right government trying to enact policies of “remigration”. 
  • There will be a generational impact – children will be born and raised in the UK and become adults with insecure status and seeing their parents stuck in insecurity and visa fee debt. No routes for children and parents in this situation have been confirmed. One person on the 10-year route said “I do not even dare to think about how much better off my children’s lives would be if we did not have to worry about our status”. 

Further division in our communities 

  • The introduction of earned settlement rests on the implication that people on migration routes are not contributing sufficiently and that it is too easy for them to settle. It was announced alongside inflammatory rhetoric with Keir Starmer referring to an “island of strangers” and claiming migration has done “incalculable damage”. 
  • The government claim they want to promote integration, but forcing people into years of precarity will have the opposite effect. If the changes are made retrospective, it will create a strong sense of betrayal among people who have already spent time and money on what they thought was their existing route to settlement.  
  • When we surveyed people on a 10-year route to settlement, 40% said their status stops them feeling properly at home or settled in the UK, and 32% said they feel completely insecure here in the UK because of their status. 
  • People also tell us that being on a long and expensive route to settlement stops them from contributing and giving back to society as much as they would like to, due to reduced employment opportunities, spare time and mental energy. One person said “You can’t have dreams or aspirations on the 10-year route.” 

We are urging MPs to keep up the pressure and write to the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister. With no justification, there should be no policy. We need our government to change course, focus on helping people settle in order to win back hope and trust, and earned settlement must be scrapped altogether. 

Category: Blog