UK settlement overhaul to be announced in the Commons today: wait rises to 10 to 15 years, thousands of Bangladeshis anxious

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is set to announce a sweeping overhaul that would raise the wait for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) for legal migrants in the United Kingdom to between 10 and 15 years. She will present the government's final policy in the House of Commons at Westminster on Monday afternoon (2 November) local time.

A Home Office source confirmed that the formal decision is being announced in Parliament today after a review of more than 200,000 responses submitted to a public consultation that began in November 2025 and ran for nearly a year. Alongside the parliamentary statement, the home secretary is also meeting general secretaries of trade unions today, many of whom have expressed deep concern about the change.

Under the new rules, the standard qualifying period for settlement would double from five years to 10 years, and for occupations below graduate level it would triple to 15 years. Foreign social care workers already working in Britain may, however, receive some exemption from the strictest rule.

A new points-based route would also be introduced, allowing the wait to be shortened on the basis of higher earnings and contribution to the local community. Analysts and MPs have already warned about staff shortages in the National Health Service (NHS) and the risk of a second Windrush scandal.

The decision has caused the greatest uncertainty and disappointment among the thousands of new migrants and their families who came from Bangladesh in recent years on care visas and skilled worker visas. These Bangladeshi workers spent large sums to move to the UK with their families in the legal expectation of settlement after five years. Those who arrived on skilled worker and spouse visas in 2021 and 2022, with less than 12 months left to complete five years, now fear falling into a financial and legal trap.

If the 10-year rule takes effect without transitional protection, a migrant family of four would have to pay roughly an extra 25,000 pounds — more than 38 lakh taka — for two further rounds of visa renewals and immigration health surcharges instead of settling.

Bangladeshi workers at organisations whose sponsor licences were revoked in Home Office action between 2024 and October 2026 are already under pressure to find a new sponsor within just 60 days. If the 10-year rule begins, that sponsor-loss risk would double, and young Bangladeshis who moved from student or graduate visas to skilled worker visas could have to wait up to 16 years in total on temporary visas before settling.

Before today's announcement, MPs from different parties, health-sector regulators and leaders of migrant and anti-racism organisations sent a joint letter on 29 October to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Health Secretary Yvette Cooper. The letter warned that the reform would repeat the discriminatory immigration policies of the Windrush era. Signatories included Labour MPs Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Diane Abbott, Clive Lewis and Rachel Maskell, and Green Party MPs Ellie Chowns, Carla Denyer, Sian Berry and Hannah Spencer. Care England, the Society of Radiographers, the Work Rights Centre and Action for Race Equality also backed the letter.

The letter urged the ministers to cancel the proposal or ensure strict legal safeguards to prevent history repeating itself. The Windrush scandal, exposed in 2017, showed that people — mainly Black and Commonwealth citizens — who had the legal right to live in Britain were wrongly detained, deported and denied work and basic services.

Health and social care leaders warned that changing the rules midway for people who planned their lives and families around the five-year rule would be deeply unfair. The Home Office has issued about 200,000 health and care worker visas in the past five years, with several hundred thousand dependants arriving with them. Health leaders said the sector already faces severe staff shortages, and that failing to retain international staff — especially in departments such as radiography — would make it hard to cut NHS waiting lists and meet cancer treatment targets.

Under the proposal, legal migrants could earn points through high income or contribution to local society to reduce the 10-to-15-year period. On the plan, Shabana Mahmood said Britain is a multi-faith, multi-ethnic democracy where contribution and integration are essential, and that settling in the country is not a birthright but a privilege that must be earned.

The policy has also caused disagreement inside the British cabinet. In June, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner criticised imposing the 15-year rule on care workers already in post as 'un-British'. In September, then energy minister Miatta Fahnbulleh refused to support the proposal, saying such a rule would have been extremely hard for her own family, who came to Britain as refugees.

The opposition Conservative Party and Reform UK, meanwhile, criticised reports that care workers already in post may be exempted. Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp alleged in a post on X that Shabana Mahmood had surrendered to Angela Rayner and left-wing Labour MPs and made a U-turn. Philp said the Conservatives want a 10-year ILR rule only for high earners. Reform UK's treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick also criticised the plan.

All eyes are now on the home secretary's statement in the Commons this afternoon, where the final outline of transitional protection — and the future of about 1.6 million legal migrants in the UK before a February 2027 deadline, as well as the question of a possible High Court judicial review — is expected to become clear.