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High earners and entrepreneurs will be eligible for UK settlement in as little as three years while others will be forced to wait three decades, under government plans to transform the legal migration system.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood on Thursday called the changes the “biggest overhaul of the migration model in 50 years”. Currently most migrants can apply for permanent status after five years.
The reforms come days after Mahmood announced plans to change the asylum system by making asylum status temporary for many people and ending the automatic right to accommodation and financial support.
Mahmood, appointed to her post in September, has moved quickly to make Britain less attractive to most migrants as part of a strategy by the Labour government to contain the threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.
The government said the most attractive terms under the new system would be available to people paying additional rate tax — now levied on incomes above £125,140 a year — and those on global talent and innovator founder visas. They will be able to settle after three years.
However, the reforms will also slow the path towards permanent settlement for the roughly 2mn people who came to the UK via legal routes after 2021, a time of record net migration to Britain.
Doctors and nurses working in the NHS would be offered a route to settlement after five years, as would people who came to the UK under the Hong Kong British National (Overseas) scheme, the Home Office said.
But, low-paid immigrants would have to wait 15 years. The Home Office said this category included the 616,000 workers and their dependants who arrived in the UK between 2022 and 2024 on health and social care visas.
The department also said people who overstayed their visas and other people with no legal right to be in the UK would have to wait 30 years.
The department made it clear, however, that none of the proposals would affect the millions of European Union and European Economic Area citizens in the UK covered by the EU Withdrawal Agreement. They will continue to have a five-year wait to be eligible for permanent settlement.
Mahmood said the UK was moving away from a migration model “built on cheap labour” that undercut British wages and jobs.
She said in a statement: “Skilled workers, entrepreneurs and high earners will be fast-tracked to settlement. My message to the world’s brightest and best is clear: you are welcome here.”
