Mahmood concedes immigration overhaul savings will fall short of £10bn estimate

Shabana Mahmood has insisted her immigration overhaul will spell “savings in the billions” for taxpayers, but acknowledged the figure will be lower than the £10 billion estimated under her original plans.

The Home Secretary defended her decision to ease restrictions on foreign care workers seeking permanent settlement in the UK, saying the revised plans would still prevent large numbers of people claiming benefits.

Under her initial proposals, lower-qualified workers who arrived on health and social care visas during the “Boriswave” from 2022 could have been made to wait 15 years for permanent settlement.

At the time, she argued that without action, some 350,000 low-skilled workers and their dependants would qualify for settlement – and access to benefits – over the next five years, coming at a lifetime cost to the taxpayer of £10 billion.

But under the revised plans announced on Monday after criticism from senior Labour figures, foreign care workers who meet their visa conditions and earn at least £25,000 a year will now only have to wait five years.

Foreign care workers who do not qualify for the five-year settlement will be able to apply for a new five-year visa, and then seek settlement once that has been completed.

Ms Mahmood declined to put a figure on the cost to the country of her watered-down plan.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday: “We will set out a full impact assessment when, around the period we lay the immigration rules before Parliament that will set out the full expected impacts.

“There will be savings in the billions, but of course, allowing people to settle at five years, given the unique contribution of care workers in particular, obviously that does have an impact on the numbers.”

She said the changes would save the Department for Work and Pensions billions in benefits payments by preventing care workers who were no longer working in the sector – “the cohort that was most likely to fall upon the state” – from securing settlement after five years and subsequently claiming benefits.

Andy Burnham said this week it is ‘difficult to say’ whether legal migration is too high or too low (PA)

PA Wire

The Home Secretary also said the level of legal immigration “has been too high”, after Andy Burnham declined to say whether that was the case.

The Prime Minister on Monday said it was “difficult to say” whether legal migration was too high or too low, arguing it depended on the economy.

Pressed on his remarks, Ms Mahmood said: “It has been too high.

“We’ve got net migration down by 82%, and we’re going to make more progress on getting those numbers down further.”

She said there would be “a new set of numbers within a few short weeks, and I’m sure we’ll be debating whether they’re too high or too low”, but “this Government has made huge progress in getting net migration down”.

Asylum minister Anna Turley agreed that immigration levels had been too high in recent years.

“I think we have certainly seen a wave that has put too much pressure on public services, and that’s what we’re trying to get a grip on now,” she told Sky News.

Pressed on Mr Burnham’s comment that planned migration could plug gaps in the workforce, the minister insisted it is Labour’s priority to address recruitment issues at home.

Ms Turley said Mr Burnham “would desperately want” young Britons to have opportunities and a programme for development, “and that we go as a last resort to immigration”.

She added: “But there’s always going to be reasons and times where we do need to have a reliance on a flow of people.”

Tory shadow home secretary Chris Philp described Ms Mahmood’s scaling down of her immigration changes as “a humiliating capitulation”.

But Mr Philp, who was a Home Office minister at the time of the peak in net migration figures under Boris Johnson’s Tory government, refused to apologise for creating the problem.

“I’m not going to personally apologise because it wasn’t my policy area,” he told BBC Breakfast.

“But I will say… it was wrong and it should not have happened.”