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UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood on Monday unveiled an immigration reform plan that will now see most legal immigrants having lived in the country for at least ten years to apply for permanent residence, or ILR. Illegal immigrants and refugees will have to wait twenty or even thirty years.
Currently, immigrants in Britain can in most cases apply for ILR after having lived in the country legally for five years.
A British permanent residence permit (ILR, indefinitely leave to remain) gives the right to live, work or study in the country indefinitely, receive any benefits and apply for social housing.
Under the new rules, which Shabana Mahmood outlined in Parliament on Monday, for the foreseeable future - the exact date has not yet been specified - there will be a basic ten-year deadline for filing an ILR application, which can be shortened or increased depending on how useful the immigrant is to Britain and how integrated he is into British society.
So, people earning more than 50 thousand pounds a year (3,293 pounds or 4,419 dollars in cash per month) will still be able to apply for ILR after living in Britain for five years.
Those earning more than £125,000 a year (almost seven thousand pounds a month in cash) will now be allowed to apply for a permanent visa after just three years.
On the other hand, if an immigrant receives certain types of benefits or has violated visa rules, his waiting period may be extended to twenty years.
The same period will be imposed on illegal immigrants (called refugees in the government reform document) who arrived in Britain by boat by sea but took up work or went to study.
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Those immigrants who entered the country illegally and are not working or studying will have to wait as long as thirty years before they can apply for ILR.
In addition, the applicant for ILR must have no criminal record and no debts to the British state, must have paid taxes for at least three years, passed an English exam and the current exam on knowledge of British legislation, history and culture - “Life in the UK”.
Minister Shabana Mahmood told Parliament on Monday that the new rules would save the British state billions of pounds in benefits for immigrants.
British political observers note that reducing immigration is important for the ruling Labor Party not only and not so much because of hypothetical savings, but primarily because of the threat posed to Labor by the right-wing populist party Reform UK, for which immigration is one of the most important topics.
As BBC political commentator Chris Mason recalls, Shabana Mahmood said last year that it was time to do something about immigration, as the country's population grew by 2.6 million people from 2021 to 2024 due to immigration - mostly legal - by 2.6 million people.
“About every thirtieth resident of our country came in these four years,” said Minister Mahmoud. Therefore, in her opinion, it is necessary to act quickly, because very soon the majority of these new arrivals will be eligible to apply for a permanent residence permit, ILR.
image copyrightHouse of Commons
“Low-paid migrants who bring with them non-working family members and children are likely to require large fiscal expenditures from the UK,” Mahmood said at the time. “It is therefore right that we introduce more stringent requirements for this category before they become eligible for permanent status.” Under current rules they usually become eligible for benefits and social housing five years after arrival.”
“Since the bulk of this category began arriving in 2022, this period will begin in 2027,” Mahmoud recalled.
These proposals were also criticized by prominent Mahmoud party members - for example, as Chris Mason reminds, then Housing Minister Angela Rayner. She said it would be “un-British” if immigrants who entered Britain under one set of rules were now introduced with another.
Immigration to Britain will peak at almost a million people in 2023, according to official figures. This was the result of the policy of the government of the conservative and Brexiteer Boris Johnson, which, having completed the process of leaving the European Union, thereby closed the opportunity to freely settle in Britain for citizens of EU countries, but at the same time simplified visa rules for the rest of the world.
Now, according to estimates from the Home Office and the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in Great Britain, the balance of migration to Britain is constantly and rapidly declining: in 2025 it was halved compared to 2024 and amounted to only 117 thousand people.
The population of Great Britain is now about 70 million people. Since 2004, with the big expansion of the European Union into Eastern Europe, the country's population has grown - mainly due to immigration - by almost 11 million.
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