SIR Keir Starmer’s administration is intent on replacing Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) next month as part of the proposed immigration reform.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that earned settlement would increase from five years to ten, arguing that living in the UK should be a ‘privilege’.
However, despite the government’s boasting about making residency, naturalisation and immigration more difficult, the minimum period before settlement remains three years. And changes meaning that some foreigners would wait 30 years looks pretty close to indefinite leave, for those who can pull it off.
Most perversely, the longer wait and extra hurdles add further incentives for abuse of the asylum system and the dozens of visas available. Meanwhile, the government is not planning to reduce the benefits that, for some, make asylum-seeking and residency-without-citizenship more rewarding than citizenship.
ILR, commonly called ‘settlement’, allows a foreigner to live, work and study in the UK without the time restrictions of a temporary visa.
The government is not exactly replacing ILR, contrary to its spin and despite the protests of Labour MPs. ‘Settlement’ will undergo a small change to ‘earned settlement’.
Since 2006, the only qualifications before ILR for most foreigners are five years of residency and no prison sentence of more than one year. Yes, you read that right. Most sentences for most crimes would not disqualify you for ILR.
As Mahmood admits, ‘settlement is near-automatic’.
While the government focuses on lengthening the baseline from five years to ten years (a proposal stolen from a Conservative policy announced in February 2025), the government is drawing little attention to the facts that some foreigners could earn ILR in as little as three years, while others would wait 30 years (which as noted perversely encourages non-compliance).
The government’s proposed policy is less simple than that released by Reform UK in September, which provoked the government to release its own proposal in November.
Reform UK’s proposal, despite Nigel Farage’s equivocation, is to replace ILR with renewable five-year visas. Advance UK and Restore Britain also want to replace ILR with ‘time-limited visas’.
The government’s proposal is more complicated, and rife with contradictions, yet less certain about the periods before settlement. The government has done little to clarify, since it closed its consultation in February, even though it schedules implementation for April. As Helena Sheizon of Kadmos Immigration told me, ‘It’s so vague, it’s virtually impossible to comment on it.’
Currently, ‘Global Talent,’ ‘innovators,’ and ‘founders’ can get ILR in as little as three years. Nothing will change for them. The new policy would settle also anybody who ‘has earned a taxable income of £125,140 for three years’.
In many ways, the three-year route is meritorious.
But from there the proposal gets wider.
Foreigners earn settlement in five years for ‘earning a taxable income of £50,270 for three years’, working in ‘public services’, volunteering, immigrating as a British National Overseas, or being a partner, parent, or child of a BNO.
Some of these criteria are vague enough to suggest that most applicants could find a way to settle after five years, which is the current baseline anyway.
Easier still is to earn settlement in ten years. Foreign students are already two to three years into those ten years by taking advantage of their allowance to hang around after graduation to look for a job (three years for doctoral graduates).
They can reduce the time requirement by proving English proficiency at university level, which they should have demonstrated before being accepted into university. (The minimum standard for all other earned settlements is A-level proficiency.)
So that leaves foreign students with six to seven years to fill with work before qualifying for settlement.
To get to ten years, foreign workers need to persuade an employer to renew a work visa at least once (each runs up to five years), or find a new sponsor within 60 days. The employer must pay up to £1,500 for each renewal and £1,035 a year for the immigrant skills charge (which is supposed to go towards training Britons). The employee (or a generous employer) pays an NHS surcharge too.
All the immigration lawyers to whom I spoke complained that these costs make settlement unreachable for most foreign residents (by their own calculations the costs run into a few tens of thousands over ten years).
But other barriers to entry are not great. Under the proposed policy, the employee needs to earn a minimum income of ‘£12,570 for a minimum of three to five years (subject to consultation)’. Compare Reform UK’s proposal (from September) that nobody should stay without earning more than the skilled worker visa’s minimum of £38,700 per year.
‘Skilled’ workers are not necessarily as skilled as you would think. Immigrant restaurants were using skilled worker visas to bring over co-ethnics to work in their kitchens until public exposure. Fake academics were hiring co-ethnics as other fake academics. Goodness knows what they are still getting away with.
Consider too that Reform would disqualify any lawful resident leaving Britain for more than 90 days. The government does not specify any absence as a disqualifier. It says ‘settled status may also lapse if the holder remains outside the UK for more than two years,’ but two years seems unsettled enough to me!
Illegal immigrants can choose either to earn settlement or to take ‘refugee core protection’ (announced earlier in 2025). The latter takes 20 years. The former could be shorter, by earning a deduction of up to seven years.
Foreigners, refugees included, could have their period before earned settlement extended by ‘up to 20 years’ for illegal entry, overstaying a visa by six months, or entering on a visit visa. Their total residency would then add up to 30 years before earned settlement.
Perverse incentives abound in the government’s proposal.
If you’re already facing a wait of 30 years, why not just abscond?
And what would you expect a legal entrant to do if faced with a wait of an extra five years for ‘receipt of public funds’, or ten years if in receipt for more than 12 months? A recipient could rationally stay on welfare as long as possible, before any deportation proceedings or enforcement catches up, if ever.
I welcome the proposal that any criminal activity disqualifies settlement. By contrast, this change is unpopular in the Parliamentary Labour Party, its base, and thence our woke institutions. Who’s to say the police, judiciary, prosecutors, the authors of guidance at the Ministry of Justice and the Attorney General won’t privilege foreigners more than ever, given the immigration implications of any criminal record?
Some of the immigration lawyers I spoke to think the government’s references to crime are unclear, and allow for the government to specify some crimes as allowable.
Relatedly, I can imagine woke institutions opening more ‘public service’ jobs to foreigners, so that more foreigners can earn settlement at five years. Mahmood herself admitted that the government’s attempt to fill up to 40,000 health and care jobs through a special visa, without a minimum salary requirement, permitted about 300,000 foreign workers from 2022 to 2024, and more than that number as dependants. ‘And abuse, as any Member of Parliament can tell you, was rife,’ she concluded.
And how open to abuse is a claim of ‘volunteering’ or ‘working in the community’? The government currently specifies neither of these things. Unscrupulous Britons could invent volunteering opportunities, out of ethnic or religious fealty, or for money. The deduction is worth five years.
Ultimately, of course, foreigners can evade any need to earn settlement, or to wait a year after earned settlement before applying for UK citizenship, by claiming a civil partnership or marriage to a British citizen. The government’s consultation ignores the historical problem of under-investigation of sham partnerships for the sake of immigration.
Given the abuses that I have hypothesised above, I expect more foreigners to earn settlement than the Home Office estimates.
The Home Office underestimates net migration of 2.6million people from 2021 to 2024, but still cites this estimate as evidence for the unsustainability of ILR. Yet the same Home Office estimates that 1.3million to 2.2million people will settle in the UK from 2026 to 2030.
Helena Sheizon warns that ‘thousands of people already on paths to settlement will face new qualifying conditions and longer waits if they do not meet newly introduced criteria’. This implies that millions will not face new conditions.
Further, many lawyer groups are promising legal action against application of new rules to foreigners already in Britain in expectation of ILR.
Other lawyers are lobbying for changes that would further reduce the population affected. The Free Movement organisation warns of discrimination against lower paid workers, particularly women. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants organised a statement by more than 120 groups categorising the proposed policy as ‘racist and classist.’ The Immigration Law Practitioners Association adds warnings that Britain would lose skilled workers to other countries – to which the law firm Mishcon de Reya adds a warning that wait periods, complexity, costs, and uncertainty are not conducive to promoting integration.
Additionally, the government (like the Conservative Party) eschews Reform UK’s proposal to cancel ILRs already granted. Farage told the Telegraph that 3.8million migrants would lose ILR under Reform’s plan.
Finally, the government eschewed the proposal shared by the Conservative, Reform, Advance and Restore parties to disqualify anyone entering illegally, even if they claim asylum. (They should have claimed asylum in the first safe country of transit.)
The government is right to increase the time before illegal immigrants can settle.
But why would a rational immigrant spend years working towards settlement when they can claim asylum and get paid £50 a week, while being accommodated, fed, medically treated, and entertained in hotels, without restriction on movements, without enforcement of the prohibition on work? Asylum benefits are as good as or better than citizen entitlements.
