As the Home Office’s earned settlement consultation closes, the UK’s oldest children’s charity warns of huge impacts on 300,000 children
The Government consultation on earned settlement closes today. In a massive overhaul of immigration policy, it proposes extending the standard route to settlement, or indefinite leave to remain (ILR), from five years to ten for people who migrate to the UK.
Retrospective effect
In a move proving controversial with Labour MPs, the Home Office proposes applying these changes retrospectively to people already in the UK who moved here on the basis that they would settle after five years.
The Institute for Public Policy Research estimates this will affect 1.35 million people already in the UK, with the top nationalities being Indian, Nigerian and Pakistani – all nationals eligible to vote in UK elections.
This includes 309,000 children. Indeed, the number of dependants who have arrived in the UK since 2021 is one of the drivers of the policy.
Children’s lives and futures are a key part of families’ considerations when they move. The chaos for families caused by retrospective effect will impact on children, as Coram’s research with children in the immigration system shows. Families need predictability to plan their children’s lives, education and futures.
Cycle of anxiety
The UK already operates a ten-year route, which tens of thousands of families have endured since it was introduced in 2012. Important improvements were made for children and young people under the past government, meaning some can get ILR after five years, but the £3000 ILR fee remains a block and many families remain caught in a punishingly long and expensive process.
Constant expensive renewal applications lead to massive instability and multiple problems in children, young people and families’ lives, including poverty, debt and thwarted ambitions.
This month a young person CCLC works had their Personal Independent Payment mistakenly suspended, despite having ongoing leave. A mother of British children on the ten-year route had all her shifts as an NHS health care assistant cancelled in anticipation of leave expiring, despite having ongoing leave.
Impact of longer routes
Longer routes to settlement will affect children and young people at every level.
To grow up in a country – to be from a country – but not to be recognised legally as permanently belonging to that country creates a disconnect. Children integrate; identity forms in childhood and adolescence and young adulthood. Legal status will lag integration, with children and young people who are British in all but paperwork.
Longer routes to settlement will mean more families with parents who have no recourse to public funds for longer, with thousands of children, including British children, spending their entire childhoods outside mainstream systems of support. This will affect the Government’s efforts to cut child poverty. Already, research shows children in migrant families are at greater risk of poverty: of the 4.45 million children in poverty in 2023/24, 1.7 million were children with parents born abroad.
However, it is not only access to benefits and social housing at issue. Proposed penalties for accessing these systems could also make families more fearful to access family hubs, Healthy Start, early years entitlements, universal free school meals, vaccination programmes and other initiatives vital to achieving Labour’s ambitions for children.
The Home Secretary has stated that it would be odd if the system for economic migration was not designed around maximising economic contribution. But the proposed system could block young people’s contribution and run counter to other Government objectives to tackle health and educational inequalities.
The Opportunity Mission is directly negated when one child whose father is a banker can settle after three years whereas another child whose mother is a nurse can only settle after 15.
What does ILR unlock?
Getting ILR affects the extent to which children and young people can participate and contribute, partly because many opportunities require ILR and partly because it means earlier naturalisation (for those not born in the UK).
For young people wanting to go to university, access to home fees and student loans is not – thanks to a landmark case in which We Belong intervened – restricted only to those with settlement, but having settlement helps.
It also opens up access to opportunities and career paths including bursaries, the civil service, the army, police, magistracy, sport and more. Becoming British brings options for travel and living abroad, consular protection and the ability to pass on British citizenship to any children.
These are the reasons why the Home Secretary calls settlement a privilege. But denying it to hundreds of thousands of children and young people in our communities will have serious disadvantages for society and the Government’s ambitions for the next generation.
Retain existing rules for children and young people
Anita Hurrell, Head of Policy at Coram Children’s Legal Centre, said:
“We welcome the Home Office recognising the gravity of the proposals and consulting on options for children and young people. We also welcome the Home Office undertaking a Child Rights Impact Assessment and urge it to publish the assessment as soon as possible, including an estimate of the impact on child poverty.
The proposed system is extremely complex, but simple options are available for the Home Office including ruling out or limiting retrospective effect, continuing to grant children leave in line with their settling parent, and retaining the existing private life rules for children and young people who have grown up in the UK. These are important parts of creating a system that takes account of children.”
For more information on our concerns and asks, please see our briefing on earned settlement.
