According to news reports, Shabana Mahmood will announce her final decision on indefinite leave to remain for legal migrants in the Commons today, ending weeks of speculation about how long low-paid workers will have to wait for settlement.
The Telegraph reports that the Home Secretary is now considering treating care workers more like other skilled workers, including doctors.
The mechanism being reported is one of earned reductions, not a straight exemption. Under the plans as reported, workers in specified public service occupations can shorten their wait for settlement through their service. A care worker who had completed five years in the public sector could take five years off a 15-year wait, bringing them to 10.
That idea is not new in itself. When the ILR proposals were first published a year ago, they already allowed five years of employment in a specified public service occupation to reduce the qualifying period by five years. What is reported to have changed is that care workers would now fall within it.
The plans as they stand would double the wait for most workers. The qualifying period for skilled workers would rise from five years to 10. The lowest paid, including care workers, would wait 15. On the original proposals, around 117,000 low-paid care workers and 79,000 dependants faced that longer wait.
The reforms have met opposition from inside the Government as well as outside it. Angela Rayner has called the plans "un-British" on the basis that they change the rules for people who are already lawfully in the UK. She has since signalled support for a compromise in which workers are recognised for the time they have already spent here.
More than 100 Labour backbenchers and several major unions have said they will oppose the reforms. Mahmood has also been in discussions with Andy Burnham, who has committed to creating a national care service.
From the other direction, Kemi Badenoch has said the Government should not retreat from making it harder for migrants who arrived in the past five years to settle permanently.
Today's statement is reported to follow discussions with ministers and MPs and more than 200,000 responses to the Home Office consultation.
Nothing has changed yet, and nothing changes until a statement of changes is laid before Parliament. The current rules remain in force until then. Press reports, including this one, describe what is expected rather than what is law.
That matters for anyone counting the years to their own application. Until the statement of changes is published and we can read the transitional provisions, nobody can say with certainty which group a particular person falls into, or whether time already spent in the UK will count.
If you are approaching five years of lawful residence, check your position now. Where an application can properly be made under the current rules, the timing of that application may matter a great deal.
We will update this page once the statement has been made and the detail is available.
If you are unsure how these changes affect you or your sponsored workers, book a consultation with our team.
We wrote about the expected changes last week in ILR changes: Mahmood to confirm final rules. You can also see our services for individuals and our work for sponsors and employers.
Book a consultation with NARA Solicitors today.
Source: "Care workers to be treated like doctors under migration plans", The Telegraph, 1 November 2026.
