Rayner challenges Mahmood on visa overhaul as Labour conference looms

Housing Secretary Angela Rayner has publicly questioned the government's plans to lengthen the route to permanent residency for foreign workers, saying the proposals are unfair to people who arrived in Britain expecting to settle under the rules that were in force when they came. Her intervention, made in an interview with The Times on the eve of Labour's annual conference, marks unusually direct criticism of a live policy by a serving cabinet minister — and one, crucially, inherited from a previous administration.

Under the proposals being developed by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, most migrants would have to remain in the UK for 10 years before qualifying for settlement, rather than the current five. Workers holding health and social care visas would face an even longer wait of 15 years. Mahmood has said a final decision on the immigration overhaul will be taken by the end of the year.

Rayner's concern centres on what she describes as moving the goalposts for people who arrived at the beginning of this decade with a reasonable expectation of achieving permanent residence. In an interview with The Times, she questioned whether it is right to alter the terms on which such people built their lives, describing the potential change as highly disruptive. "I do have concerns about that," she said, adding that she believed the shift in the rules was unfair because it retrospectively changes the deal.

A particular anxiety for Rayner is the effect on overseas care staff. She said the changes would hit foreign care workers who had relocated to Britain in order to look after loved ones, many of whom have spent years working in a sector widely acknowledged to be under severe staffing pressure. For those individuals, a 15-year qualifying period is not an abstract policy detail but a practical question about the security of their status and their families' futures.

The politics of the intervention are significant. The settlement rules were a legacy of Keir Starmer, whose government drew sustained criticism — including from Labour politicians — for failing to act on the small boats crisis at the Channel. Rayner served as Starmer's deputy prime minister before being brought back into the cabinet by Prime Minister Andy Burnham in July. Her decision to speak out now, while Mahmood's policy is still being drafted, amounts to a challenge to a proposal the current prime minister inherited but has not yet put into effect.

That a minister is willing to break with collective discipline so close to the party conference is itself telling. It reflects a growing push from sections of the Labour Party — including a sizeable bloc of its MPs — to remove the retrospective element of the plans, which would apply the longer qualifying periods to people already living and working in Britain. Rayner has been consistent on this point. In June, shortly after rejoining the government, she described proposals to change the rules for migrants already in the UK as wrong. She now says Mahmood is well aware of her position and that her view has not shifted since her return to cabinet.

Burnham himself had hinted at sympathy with her position even before taking office. Asked about her criticisms in June, the then Labour leader said he understood where she was coming from, adding that the party would do well to listen to what she had to say. That supportive tone contrasts with the more defensive framing adopted by some of Rayner's colleagues.

Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, has echoed the call for a rethink. Speaking on the BBC's Today programme, she argued that the proposal was wrong on both technical and moral grounds — a matter of values, rather than only administrative detail. She said the harm would fall on people who had come to Britain to serve faithfully only to be told they must wait another decade to obtain British citizenship.

The internal pressure has been sustained beyond the cabinet. Trade unions have pressed the government to soften the proposals, and a letter to Mahmood at the start of the year, jointly signed by dozens of Labour MPs, described the plans as un-British. The strength of that criticism prompted Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to respond directly, rejecting the description. She told Today that she did not believe the policy was un-British, arguing that the UK has never granted an automatic route to citizenship for the majority of people arriving from overseas.

Nandy, however, declined to offer an unequivocal defence of backdating the changes to workers already in the country. Instead, she framed the home secretary's task as balancing respect for people "regardless of who they are or where they stand" with the need for an immigration system the public can have confidence in. Asked whether Labour was willing to reconsider, she said ministers always reserve the right to change their minds, but equally reserve the right to stick to their plans if they believe they are right. That careful formulation has been read in Westminster as a hint that the government is contemplating transitional arrangements.

Nandy said the government would not change the rules of the game in a way that unfairly disadvantages migrants who have contributed to the UK, and that it would strike the right balance between treating people fairly and decently as human beings and maintaining confidence in the asylum and immigration system. For a party whose unity is already being questioned on multiple fronts, the emphasis on contribution and fairness is notable — and is notably absent a full-throated justification of applying tougher rules retrospectively.

The stakes for Mahmood became clear when she appeared before the Home Affairs Committee earlier this month. She said she was acutely aware that, absent a change, a large cohort of people who arrived in 2022 would qualify for permanent settlement in February 2027 — meaning millions of decisions about status could be affected by the timing of the announcement. She added that later in the year the government would set out its new settlement policy, "as well as any transitional arrangements we might decide to implement."

That last phrase has become the focus of the debate. If ministers reverse course on applying the longer qualifying periods to those who arrived from 2021, the large numbers already in Britain from that date would retain a quicker and easier route to settlement. Reform UK and the Conservatives are likely to seize on any such retreat, framing it as a U-turn on enforcement. Conversely, pressing ahead unchanged risks a conference dominated by argument between the prime minister, his home secretary and one of his own senior ministers — an unusual spectacle for a party meeting in a week.