Mahmood declines to give cost of care worker settlement climbdown

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has declined to say how much it will cost to scrap her plan to make foreign care workers already in the UK wait longer to qualify for permanent settlement, telling the BBC that detailed costs would be published when the changes are put before Parliament. Mahmood had originally proposed doubling the standard qualifying period for settlement from five years to 10, with some migrants facing a 15-year wait. The Home Office suggested the plan could save £10bn, based on the net lifetime cost of care workers and their adult dependants expected to settle between 2026 and 2030 under existing rules. The secretary had previously argued that failing to delay settlement for migrant care workers already in the UK would lead to a "£10bn drain on our public finances". Under revised plans announced on Monday, which the Conservatives described as a "U-turn", care workers who arrived in the UK before May 2025 and earned at least £25,000 a year will continue to qualify after five years, alongside some other groups. Those who do not qualify will be able to apply for a new five-year visa and then seek settlement. While not detailing the cost of the revised plans, Mahmood told BBC Radio 4's Today programme they would still save "billions" because workers in other sectors would have to wait longer. She said the changes represented savings in the billions to the Department for Work and Pensions through people not claiming benefits. "The reason for that is the cohort that was most likely to fall upon the state is that cohort of care workers not doing care work at the moment - if they'd settled at five years, many more of those would have gone on to claim benefits," she said. "That will now not happen because they will not be settling at five years - those individuals get a second chance to make that contribution that they originally came to make." Home Office minister Anna Turley told BBC Breakfast the plans would deliver "at least £1bn over the next couple of years in terms of welfare savings", but said further calculations on the total were still being done. The Conservatives said the "U-turn" would cost the UK billions of pounds. Just over 500,000 people will now be delayed from gaining permanent residency, down from almost 800,000 before Monday's changes. Some 1.9 million people are expected to settle in the UK between 2026 and 2030, according to the Home Office. Indefinite leave to remain, also known as settlement, gives a person the right to live, work and study in the UK indefinitely, apply for eligible benefits and seek British citizenship. The £10bn figure has been disputed by the Institute for Public Policy Research, which found a £115bn addition to UK public finances under current settlement rules. "Public debate has focused heavily on the costs of recent migration, but this is not the whole story," IPPR associate director Marley Morris said. Mahmood has denied the move was a U-turn, saying a public consultation produced a "transformative package" that "strikes the right balance". She also declined to say whether Prime Minister Andy Burnham had told her to change tack on proposals first put forward in November under his predecessor Sir Keir Starmer. The revision followed a backlash from within the Labour Party over applying the longer wait retrospectively to workers already in the UK. Housing Secretary Angela Rayner had said it amounted to changing the goalposts, while several MPs described the retrospective approach as "un-British" and warned it could worsen the UK's skills shortage, particularly in the care sector. The revised plans came against a backdrop of falling visa numbers. Some 727,487 people were approved to come to the UK on visas from July 2025 to June 2026, excluding visitors and those in transit, a 15% drop on the previous year. Study visas made up 53% of the total, with people from China and India together accounting for nearly half of study visas, a pattern that has persisted for many years.