Welcome to our second session on routes to settlement, looking particularly at the Government’s announcement on changes they may wish to make. We were planning to do a full inquiry on this but because the Government made their announcement, we are doing this as a shorter inquiry so we can feed into the consultation. We are grateful to the witnesses for coming. Before I ask the witnesses to introduce themselves, I want to acknowledge the enormous level of public interest in this inquiry. We have received a perhaps unprecedented almost 6,000 written submissions to our inquiry, the vast majority from people who are currently living in the UK on a route to settlement and may be affected by the Government’s reforms. We will explore the potential impacts of the proposed reforms today, and tomorrow we will question the Home Secretary about the Government’s proposals. We will carefully consider the views of those members of the public who have submitted evidence alongside the views of our expert witnesses before setting out our views on the Government plans and where they might need to change.

I am Solange Valdez-Symonds. I am CEO and Solicitor for the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens, PRCBC.

I am Chrisann Jarrett and I am CEO of We Belong.

I am Michelle Lee-Izu. I am Chief Operating Officer (Children’s Services) for Barnardo’s.

I am Anna Skehan. I am the Legal Practice Lead at the Migrant and Refugee Children’s Legal Unit, which is part of Islington Law Centre.

In this session, we will focus on the impact that the proposed changes may have on children. The Committee felt strongly we wanted to understand this so that we could make the appropriate comments. Let us start the question with Bell Ribeiro-Addy.

I want to start by asking some questions about the experiences of young people under the current system. Anna, how easy it is for children and young people to achieve settlement under the current system?

Thank you. One key point I want to make first is that this is not a fringe issue. In 2024, 16% of settlement grants were for children and 7% were for young people aged 18 to 25. A quarter of people who are obtaining settlement are children and young people. In my view and experience, the current system is not child-friendly and is disproportionately punitive of small errors. The systems are set up to render children invisible in their own applications by focusing on adults as main applicants, despite the member of the family who holds the right to remain being a child. Broadly speaking, children have four routes to settlement outside the EUSS system. One is based on private life, including the seven-year residence period for children, young adults who have spent more than half their lives in the UK, and those young people who are otherwise long resident in the UK. The child or sibling of a British citizen has a family life route. There are routes as a dependant, perhaps of someone with a work visa, a study visa or on a protection route. In their own right, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have a protection route. The lengthier routes to settlement tend to arise out of concessions to the immigration rules that recognise the particular needs of children. One that particularly comes to mind is the family and private life routes, some of which are as long as 10 years. Leave to remain is granted in short chunks, which is not how children live their lives. Significant fees are attached to all the immigration applications all the way up to settlement. Whereas fee waivers are available along the route, when you come to settlement, the fee is mandatory. High application fees of over £3,000 are applied to children’s applications. Children themselves have no means to earn money and pay those fees. In my work with children and young people, I am aware that children do become aware of their immigration status. They are conscious that they have to live with that daily. They can find it out early in the process or they can find it out shortly before they become adults. At whichever point in the process they discover that they do not have an immigration status that matches their peers, it causes them significant worry and distress. The real concerns are the punitive, lengthy nature and how incompatible that is with the short duration of children’s lives as children, and also the extent to which children are almost an afterthought in their own lives in these applications that are of fundamental importance to them.

What are the application processes like? Are they lengthy? Are they short? What is the difference between them?

The applications must be made via an online application form. Those application forms are quite standardised across a range of routes and so they are not necessarily particular to the application the child is making at the time. I represent children and so I complete that application form with them. I cannot imagine a child being able to complete that without assistance, but the access to assistance is limited given the crisis in the legal aid system at present. The online forms are not always clear. Sometimes it is difficult to describe your own situation. You have to tick a box and make sure that your situation falls in the box but, if the box does not give you an option that describes your circumstances, options to explain are limited. If you fill in the wrong application form, the consequences can be that you lose any leave to remain that you already have, which can be absolutely devastating currently because, if your lawful presence is broken, counting on a 10-year route to settlement or even a five-year route to settlement, a period of extended unlawful presence resets your clock to zero. The stakes are high in making sure that the application is the correct application to make and that it is completed fully and accurately.

Chrisann, what has the impact been of the introduction of the five-year route for children and young people who have lived in the UK for most of their lives?

As an organisation, we campaigned for over five years for the 10-year route to be reduced for children, childhood arrivals and those growing up in the UK. We asked the Government at the time for a shorter and an affordable route to settlement, and they answered the former, making it shorter. We welcomed these changes back in 2022 for young people who had strong ties to the UK. We have been tracking that since 2022, and young people have described it as having a transformative impact on their life. It means something to have been told that you are temporary for so many years and to then transition to settlement, which is giving you some security and permanence. Throughout their immigration journey when they were on these previously long routes, young people have had to grapple with the inability to plan their lives in the future free from Home Office hindrance. We have noted a lot of young people being able to pursue certain careers. A young person we previously worked with, as a result of being able to get earlier settlement, can now go on a secondment and, as part of this training contract, is able to spend six years abroad. It also impacts young people’s interactions with specific services, whether it be higher education or administrative departments. Every 30 months when a young person has to renew their status, it impacts that relationship when they constantly have to prove yet again that they have lawful status. Permanent residence removes that constant disruption in their engagement with their employers and their educators. Beyond that, there is the material aspect of no longer having to save up every two and a half years for fees, so you have that financial freedom from the Home Office—that mental stability and permanence is important. Having said that, we have monitored these changes and through our legal advice clinic, as well as in excess of 100 case studies on the impact stories of young people, we have found that the change from the 10-year to the five-year route for children and young people has been limited because that five-year route on paper still operates within a system that prioritises conditionality and high fees and prolonged uncertainty. We have seen people coming off the route and getting their five-year settlement, but we have seen people—children and young people—trapped in the system because it currently costs over £3,000 to secure that settlement and, as Anna said, there is no fee waiver associated with that. Even though we find that young people are eligible for a settlement, they cannot afford it, and so they are stuck in the leave to remain route. This route does not promise stability. It is about financial endurance. We see a lot of young people trapped in that loop. That undermines the five-year route and the spirit of the changes. Young people are being priced out, not because they do not meet the criteria, but simply because the system is failing to allow them to afford it.

To be clear, is this being applied to some children for various reasons who have been born here or who may have lived and gone to primary school here?

Yes, absolutely. I have lived experience of what we are talking about here, of being stuck on a route. When we started working in this area, these were seen as the “unintended consequences”. Children and young people are unseen within this. Yes, absolutely, we are talking about children born here to non-British parents, but also some of our core group have been here since the age of three months, six years or eight years, and they have spent their formative years in the UK.

Do you want to touch a little bit on the impact that immigration status has on education and employment? You did mention it a little bit before, but could you speak about some of the people you work with and what this ends up doing to them?

Absolutely. Young people contact us often at age 18, usually with an issue regarding their higher education prospects. They have a place at university and some of them have been told that they have to pay international fees despite being in this country for a long time. That is normally when our intervention takes place. The issue there is usually proving that they have the right to home fee status and we work through that with them. As an organisation, we would love to say that once we have provided them with the support, and the university and student finance offers them home fee status, that is the end of the intervention. However, every 30 months when they have to reapply for their status, it causes a lot of disruption because every year they have to re-enrol and every year they have to do their student finance and get that issued. It is not as simple as submitting an application to the Home Office and getting a response immediately. It has a waiting period. It is rife with a lot of delays. We have had situations where young people are unable to graduate from their studies because they are still waiting for a decision from the Home Office. The digitisation process should have made this slightly easier because you can prove your status using a share code. However, young people have multiple disruptions. On average, the Home Office says the waiting period between a submission and a decision is six months, but we have had young people waiting up to two years or 10 months. If a condition of that interaction with the educator is that you must prove your status, if you are unable to do that, if a share code is not issued and if a decision is not made, it makes it a rather uncomfortable re-entry back into your academics every single year. For employers as well, the Home Office might say it is easy for them to check that, but the share codes last only for a specific period of time. Unless an employer is lovely, they might not want to keep rechecking. That administrative burden on employers makes it a deterrent for young people with specific statuses to get employment and maintain that.

What would you change to make the system fairer?

Settlement is important, and that permanence. For children who have grown up here seeing themselves as similar to their peers, it causes a bit of a fracture when you are told that, no, you are temporary. Every interaction over the course of the next five or 10 years of your life into your late 20s or early 30s is problematic. Longer routes will only exacerbate that and that level of insecurity being felt. Children become young adults and young adults become fully fledged members of society. If that journey into adulthood is marred by what young people have described as the Home Office being an ever-present elephant in the room throughout their childhood, it is quite disruptive. Longer routes are problematic, but also the fees, which I have mentioned, and the administrative disruption every two and a half years to a young person’s life.

Solange, I want to ask some questions about citizenship because it follows on from that. They changed the law in 1981 so you were not automatically British if you were born here. I think that is the case. Why are you concerned about the implications of the proposed changes for children’s access to British citizenship?

Maybe I should start by explaining the British Nationality Act 1981. It came into force on 1 January 1983. A child born before 1 January 1983 was automatically British. The 1981 Act saw the end of the jus soli. No longer would you be automatically British by birth. The 1981 Act was debated for nearly a year. There were serious concerns about the end of jus soli, the impact on race, the impact on looked-after children, the impact generally, and how the message would be put across about how those born after 1 January 1983 are no longer automatically British. There were a lot of promises. Parliament debated who might become British and under what circumstances. Again, there were a lot of debates, consultations, concerns, and a lot of participation from faith groups and community groups. The main issue in 1983 was that anyone who had a connection with the UK would be automatically registered. I will explain a little bit more about that in a minute. Generally, Parliament intended that, by the end of five years, a migrant adult would normally be settled in the UK. Many countries apply the same rules. A migrant would normally be settled within five years. The Act was introduced with specific criteria for a connection. First, a person would be automatically British by birth if the parent was either British or settled at the time of the birth. If they were born in the UK and the father or mother was British or settled, the person would automatically be British. The second provision was an entitlement to be registered as a British citizen. A child born in the UK when the parents were not British or settled would qualify to be registered by right, by entitlement, if one of the parents became a British citizen or settled at any time during the time of minority. That is section 1(3). That is the law. That is the 1981 Act. Little has been done about those children who had half an entitlement. Some have aged out. Some are 20, 30 or 40-year-olds. The third provision, which was a backup for harsh cases, was that anyone born in the UK whose parents were neither settled or British, and who lived in the UK for the first 10 years without an absence of 90 days, would have a right to register by entitlement. It did not matter what the parents’ status is or was. That child could register by entitlement. It was done to ameliorate the end of jus soli. It was a promise, an entitlement. It is in the Act. That Act has become dusty. Sections 1(3) and 1(4) have not been respected since then. Every time there are new provisions like the proposals now, it has a huge impact on the children we assist. It is an insult to the 1981 Act and all the promises and entitlements that we have been given. Why? The new proposals are suggesting that a person will now have to wait until they are 10, 15, 20 or maybe 25 by the time they become settled or British, 30 maybe. We believe that the proposals will cause a lot of damage to the children and individuals who should be protected by the 1981 Act. The whole entitlement automatically to be British if a parent is not settled or British will no longer be there if these proposals come in. The fact that Parliament saw five years as a clear connection and then 10 years for harsh cases is all being abandoned. It already has been neglected. PRCBC is a small project. We are small. We have one employee. We have some volunteers. It seems like PRCBC is carrying the UK in its obligations, with all respect. Every time there are new provisions, nothing is said about this entitlement.

What are some of the practical consequences for children and young people when that right to citizenship is either delayed or denied?

Let us start from the basic one of not having a British passport. Some cannot travel because they do not have any other nationality or are unclear what their nationality might be. It is difficult to demonstrate a bundle of rights that we all take for granted: schools, colleges, universities, student loans, employment, benefits, identity, being able to show your passport, feeling that you belong. They are not able to pass their own British citizenship to their children and so we have second and third generations without citizenship. You are not able to go to school trips and, if you do, you are marginalised because you are the one in the wrong queue—the long queue or the short queue, whichever way you want to look at it. You want to be among your friends and your school peers. In general, I would like to perhaps share what the High Court said about the PRCBC challenge and how the children felt. The citizenship that has been denied to them causes them to live in limbo, making them feel alienated, excluded, isolated, second-best, insecure and not fully assimilated into the fabric and social culture of the UK. I have a lot more to say, but I will stop there.

Are particular groups of children at risk of missing out?

The children that we see or the adults that we now see often have lived and continue living in poverty or isolation—single-parent households, looked-after children, disabled parents, disabled children, children with addictions, children who have been groomed, children with criminal offences because they have been abandoned.

Is the cost an implication? I know PRCBC did a lot of work on getting the waiver in place, but I know it is not necessarily always being granted.

The provisions for the fee waivers and exemptions for looked-after children are great because local authorities were struggling with that. That is just for children, not for care leavers, for instance. For children who are not being looked after, it was introduced with an 84-page form with a long list of evidence for how poor you are. Therefore, sometimes the evidence is not easy to get when you are not working and not on state benefits and you have to prove something impossible to prove. How do you prove poverty to be able to qualify for a fee waiver? I spent 21 hours in one case to try to prove that. How many hours are Home Office officials and caseworkers spending on processing a fee waiver of £1,214 for a child who has an entitlement? That is insulting.

Could any type of modification be made to these earned settlement proposals that would address a lot of the concerns that you have or would they have to be dealt with differently?

Introduce no fee other than an admin fee. At the moment, for the £1,214 registration fee, it costs the Home Office £500 and a bit to process the application. The rest is cost recovery and profit making. A child pays that much. That is clearly shameful. Bring back legal aid for citizenship cases. Without legal aid, there is nowhere to go to get advice on complex cases. You can imagine that these cases will become complex because some of the parents have died. It is difficult to get evidence of parent status sometimes. Even the Home Office is not willing to turn their computers on and disclose the status of the parent, which might lead to registration by entitlement or show that the child is already British. A lot of blockage prevents children who may already be British and who have an entitlement to register the entitlement. There are fees, no legal aid, nowhere to go. Often these children are vulnerable and the parents are vulnerable. Therefore, everything will block them from having that right. If I may, PRCBC has an advice line as well as taking a number of complex cases every week. This week I have four cases that are within what you were asking. I would like to share one, maybe randomly. “I was born and raised in the UK and have lived here my entire life, aside from leaving the country once when I was little. I recently made an application for a British passport, which was refused, and it came to light that my mum did not complete the relevant paperwork following her grant of settled status when I was a child. The complication is that I spent significant parts of my childhood in care, and I have since been advised that at the time it should have been the responsibility of the local authority to ensure the appropriate applications or documentation were completed on my behalf, as I was under a full care order until I left at 18.” These are the type of words we get daily.

Thank you very much. I am Peter Prinsley. I am the MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket. Thanks for coming today. Am I correct in assuming that large numbers of children have no citizenship, then? They have come here with parents who are not citizens and they may have been born here. What is your estimate of the number of children we have to deal with who are simply not citizens? Where are they citizens of? Are they citizens of the country that their parents have come from or are they citizens of nowhere?

It is a complex question, but I will try to do my best. It is best to separate the children who are born here, because they may or may not be British automatically. If they are, they can get a passport today and get on with their lives. Some children born in the UK who are not automatically British but might have an entitlement to register. That registration by entitlement can be difficult and blocked by the fees, by having no legal aid, by the parents not knowing, by social services not knowing, by the child not knowing. The child is relying on the parents or carers. Some children are brought to the UK with their parents or may come later to join their parents and should have a right to register by discretion before they turn 18. To highlight this again, I would love to speak on behalf of many of the people I see, but I would rather share what I experience nearly every day when I get queries. “I was brought to the UK when I was a toddler. I am now 21. I left my mother’s house in my teens due to constant abuse. I have been left in silent darkness about my legal stance in the UK. I have no connection to my country of birth other than my ethnicity. My life as I have always known it is in the UK and I need help to stay working in the UK. Please help.” That is a child migrant, who came to the UK with their parents as a toddler, and now is 21 and has no status whatsoever and feels quite concerned and scared.

Do you have any estimate of the number of children who might be affected?

Some academics estimate that about 200,000 children born in the UK are unclear as to their status, but that is academic and quite an old figure. We do not know. The number is getting bigger. I get queries nearly every day, similar to the ones I have read.

I am hearing that an untold number of children are completely unprotected.

Yes, that is right. It is not just children any more. It is adults. It is the 1983 Act. This has happened since. We have 40-year-olds.

The general public in this country are not aware of that. They would be simply horrified to learn that.

Thank you for saying that. I set up PRCBC thinking that I would set it up for only three months and I would go and speak and people would listen. It is now 14 years and I would like to retire and close the shop.

You cannot retire.

Michelle, there are situations when children and young people are given citizenship or settlement and their parents are not. What difficulties or challenges do they face at those points in time?

Having citizenship does not remove the pressures that they are under. They are still facing issues such as poverty. They have problems about their family not having those rights. Many of those children talk to us about feeling worried still. Even if they have citizenship, they are worried about the rest of the family and how that impacts on them. We know that sometimes the parents have mental health issues as a result of that constant pressure and that constant worry. Then that impacts on the children. We did a poll of a group of our children that we were working with and a wider group of children who talked about how they worry constantly about poverty, food poverty, and what is happening. Just because they have status, it does not alleviate the pressures that we are seeing for that cohort of children and young people. It is about the pressure on the whole family and how they feel and also how it can cause conflicts within the family at times.

Thank you. Anna, what impact does the current 10-year route to settlement have on children and young people and their families?

Such a lengthy route to settlement applying to so many children and young people has significant impacts. There are three key impacts, I would say. There is the impact of poverty, as Michelle has spoken about. There is the impact of what we call de-integration, feeling when a child becomes aware that their family is treated differently from other families and the families of their peers, that they cannot access things that other families can access, that they have stress points that other people do not experience, that they cannot go on school trips, that they cannot go on a holiday, that their parents are constantly in two-and-a-half-year cycles of saving for the next application. Then there is the risk of returning to unlawful presence if they do not have citizenship or settled status. All those come together because of the length of the route, because of the short periods of leave to remain, and because of the high levels of fees. We see harm to the mental health of children and young people. I can think of a family that I have worked with. The oldest child is British but her mum and her youngest brother are not. She worries all the time about whether their next application will be refused for a reason or for a technicality or they might fall off the route to settlement because they fill in the wrong application or make an application late. She has had to see doctors about constant vomiting. The doctors eventually came to the conclusion that it is stress-based. It dominates her life, although she is British. It has a similar impact on those who are on the route themselves. The other issue that we see on fees is that families will try desperately to save to pay the fees and then they will reach the end of two and a half years. I am sure two and a half years is not a long period of time. Your Government are on a five-year cycle and I am sure that you do not feel that you get as much done as you would like to in that period of time. If you halve that, think about what is feasible for you to achieve. Families save up fees for every single member because there is a separate fee payable for each member of the family. It is beyond people’s reach because the costs are so enormous. Families are forced into difficult choices. Adults in families are the conduits to access to the labour market and access to benefits to house and feed the family. If you have managed to put enough money together to pay one or maybe two fees, you have to prioritise the breadwinners and you have to leave the children off the application. Nobody makes a free choice to do that. That choice is forced upon them by the costs involved because not everybody knows about fee waivers and not everybody knows how to put together the wealth of evidence required to obtain one. The availability of legal advice on that point is diminishing by the day, unfortunately. We see that it puts a real risk on someone who has regularised their stay and who has a keen desire to pursue that route through to the settlement that they very much need. When it comes down to being able to feed the family, the breadwinner has to go first. That is one significant impact that we see on children.

We have seen a lot of poverty and we have welcomed the Government’s poverty strategy. We believe that this will drive children and families deeper into poverty. We are worried about that. We have been talking for some time in Barnardo’s about families needing to choose whether to heat their home or eat. For these families, we are talking about choices around whether they pay for visas and their NHS contribution, as well as paying all their normal payments that they make, their NI payments, their tax, so that they are contributing to the country. They are talking about needing to make those decisions about whether to eat or save up for those fees. As Anna said, they are having to make tough decisions that impact on children and young people. We have been running a child poverty fund. We started with a cost-of-living fund and then moved into a poverty fund. We know that families that have no recourse to public funds have to ask for support for some basic things. Not all children have access to things like warm coats, shoes and beds to sleep in. Often they live in multiple households that are not appropriate or poor housing. I do not know if we will come back to some of those things.

What about the risk of organised crime sweeping them up to provide them with an income?

Yes, we are worried about that. We know that the exploiters are looking already. They are ahead of us all the time. They are looking for the next opportunity. I am sure they have looked at the proposals here and they them as a real opportunity to exploit further. We run the Independent Guardian Service. We know that traffickers take these opportunities to exploit children and young people and move them into criminal exploitation or frighten them by giving them quite a lot of information that is quite true in legislation, but the way they paint it then holds the children in those situations. We are seeing children already in quite dire situations. We think this will make those situations worse. We are also concerned about what it might mean for an increase of children entering care if parents cannot look after their children. We have seen in other countries, when there are high levels of poverty, more children go into care than any other time. We know that the Children’s Minister wants to provide family support generally to drive down the numbers of children in care. We know that is a huge cost to the fiscal purse, but we also know that those children do not have great outcomes. We are talking about children here who already do not have good outcomes and then have increasing problems. We also do not know, if children are destitute, whether the authorities will feel they have to step in. These parents have never wanted that. It is not why they have come to the UK. Most of them have come because they want to create better lives for people in the UK by contributing their skills and experience, and also to improve the lives of their children and young people.

I want to focus a little bit more on the impact of longer routes. Maybe if I address this to all of you to start with, what do you feel are the most serious potential impacts on children and young people of the Government’s proposals to extend routes to settlement? What impact do you expect the 15-year route to have on the children of medium-skilled workers?

Quickly, before I go into responding to the question, it is a good segue from what Michelle has mentioned because it all comes back to the same themes that we have been seeing over a number of years. Peter Prinsley asked prior to this about the figures. How many children and young people are growing up in the UK with what we describe as precarious status? Helpfully or unhelpfully, we often reference the GLA research with the Wolverhampton University studies into the number of young people with precarious status in 2019, which estimated over 333,000 children and young people, some born here, some migrated here at a young age. That was in 2019. I would not be surprised if it has increased since then because of some of the things that we are discussing. First, I want to go back in answering your question. What young people describe from being on long routes is state-imposed unwantedness. It changes the nature in which you can relate to your peers, your community, and also society and the state if you are constantly being told you are temporary and you do not belong. Being in a 10-year or 15-year route or indefinitely being in a series of limbo impacts on how children relate to their society. It often creates a lot of animosity. That is internalised as shame within young people who feel like there is something wrong with them. As part of We Belong, we also provide mental health provision to some of the young people with the limited resources that we have. That identity piece is important. Children grow up feeling anxious about their right to remain here. We saw it at the height of the Windrush scandal when people and families were calling in and thinking, “Surely this could happen to us even if we do all the right things”. There is a deep level of imposed insecurity and stigma around the physical presence and people feeling like they and their families are being punished indefinitely because they made the choice to migrate here. It causes even more complex issues with children who were born here and have never seen the country birth of their parents but have been told that they are not British. It is important to pick up on that hypersensitive but also constant and palpable feeling of not belonging in the UK.

Chrisann, could you maybe expand on where you feel the impact is likely to be of longer routes on young people’s integration?

Yes. Everything, as I mentioned, in the family household is wrapped up in maintaining status, and it goes back to fees and links to child poverty. The Government cannot say that they prioritise eradicating child poverty when they oversee a system that orchestrates the financial ruin of the parents of these children. In the long term, it has many impacts. On the 10-year route, let alone the 15, the current fees for leave to remain are in excess of £3,900. That would mean that every family of four, every two and a half years, would have to pay around £31,000. Nothing is more expensive in a migrant family’s household than paying for Home Office fees and everything in the family’s unit is lumped up in that. On the impact on social integration, some young people are unfortunately unable to integrate and participate without status. Michelle and Anna mentioned the hardship, but we have seen cases where parents have had to choose which child should get a renewal while some young people are left back. You can have a household of mixed statuses where your elder brother or sister is able to proceed to higher education when you have a place and you are unable to go. Young people have described the feeling of being extremely stuck. Poverty is a big issue here, and I wanted to address this with the case studies that we have. We have a young person, Amir, who is 21 and he arrived in the UK aged five. Over the years, the immigration system has not only disrupted his sense of security but also deprived his family of any financial stability and wellbeing. The family has accumulated over £27,000 in debt due to the Home Office’s fees and legal costs. Living in a one-bedroom home, they could not afford an additional bed, forcing Amir’s mother to sleep on the floor for years. As a result, she now suffers from chronic back pain. The cramped living conditions have also impacted Amir’s younger sister, who was born in the UK. Her mobility is limited and she cannot run or skip like other children her age, having grown up in restricted spaces. Participation is limited. Children just being children is limited. A care to eradicate child poverty should be for all children, regardless of their migration background.

Thank you. Anna, what impacts are the longer-term routes having on the number of children and families who become undocumented or lose their immigration status?

I cannot see how extending the routes can do anything other than increase the number of people who become undocumented. Maintaining lawful presence through a 10-year route to settlement, in my experience, is a feat of endurance and will and, to an extent, luck. If you double that, you halve the number of people who can manage it. It is hard to convey the extent to which it feels like you have tied a sack of rocks to someone and they are trying to drag those rocks along with them for a decade, or now for 15 years. The more years that there are, the more years of childhood and young adulthood are blighted and the greater the risk that people will become undocumented. I also have concerns about the extent to which people will remain in abusive relationships to avoid having to go onto benefits or to avoid their routes extending. I share Michelle’s concerns about the risk that that poses of exploitation of young people and being told you do not belong and retriggering childhood trauma every two and a half years. I have found young people I have worked with whose initial becoming undocumented was a trauma as a result of something unpleasant happening to them. They are then forced to relive that every two and a half years for 10 years and for 15 years now. We are looking at maybe 20 or 30, according to some of the proposals and depending on the circumstances that people find themselves in. I contrast that with one of the young people I worked with. We managed to secure her early ILR at discretion. Having obtained indefinite leave to remain, she was then able to access therapy. It is difficult for people to access therapeutic services when it is not clear how long they will be in the country. The waiting lists are long. If the waiting list is longer than your leave to remain, you may not get placed on it or you may not be able to benefit. Many therapists will not offer treatment that is able to resolve the matter in circumstances where the person’s situation is not stable. This young person was able to access therapy after she was granted indefinite leave to remain. As a result of that, she has been able to go into education and she is training to be a nurse. She says, “I feel like a different person because I do not have to every two and a half years beg to stay in the place that is the only place that I know”.

Underlying this idea of extending the long routes to settlement is the idea that this will act as a significant disincentive for families to turn up here with children. Do you believe that to be the case?

I am not an expert on push and pull factors. The families I work with are, largely, resident for extended periods before they meet me. Already quite significant periods of residence have to be undertaken before people can enter the human rights routes based on their residence—a minimum of seven years if you are talking about a child, half your life if you are talking about a young adult, 20 years if you are an adult. It is quite unlikely that it would act as a deterrent. People come here for reasons related to study, work, tourism, and life happens to them. No one comes with the intention of overstaying. If you enter as a worker and you have a catastrophic injury or a serious illness, you do not stop having a life in addition to that.

I agree with you.

Chrisann, following on from what you have said, generally speaking, people come to come to the UK for a better life often for their families or they have a good job or something like that. Following on from what Peter said, the public do not have a huge awareness of this at all in regard to children as well. Do you agree that if the Government are doing all that they can with child poverty, that should be in the mix? How do you think that the Government would best go about that?

Absolutely. A lot of people in this room have been trying to not educate but raise awareness. A lot of the stories that we are talking about here are untold stories about policies that have not been well thought through and the implications of that on a subset of children and young people growing up in the UK. As Anna said, these people are not going anywhere because they have been here for a long time and have spent a significant number of years here. We are trying to cut through the migration rhetoric to say that you are not thinking about the whole groups of young people and children who are trapped in the system of legal limbo. One good thing that happened in 2022 with the 10-year route being shortened to five for childhood arrivals was an acknowledgement that this is a special cohort and that this cohort is not going anywhere. We saw glimmers of that in the White Paper with the Government stating that they will pay special attention to those who have grown up here and at the age of 18 recognised they have precarious status, and also to remove barriers to citizenship for children. That motivation is there. However, we have seen that get lost in the debate currently, especially when it comes to things being retrospectively applied to those already here. If the Government were to take it seriously, it would not be to lengthen routes and to trap families indefinitely in a legal limbo. It definitely would not be to keep the fee status as it currently is, because it is not manageable. A migrant family would have to save up £500 or £600 every month for 10 years of their lives. That is a ridiculous view of what economic stability would look like. A big part of it as well is that people come here but they should not be punished indefinitely, especially children being locked up. We need a reduction of the fees to the cost price, a review of the routes, and also for the debate around migration to not be focalised on stopping the boats or net migration. Our migration journey here in the UK has far more variety and is rife with complexity as well. Often families cannot navigate this system without legal advice and support. There is no safety net for those. The Government could do a lot to respond quite robustly to it. If children have rights and entitlements, they should absolutely remove all barriers to them achieving that.

Anna, could these proposals lead to more children and young people moving on to the five-year private life route?

It is quite difficult to answer that definitively because the proposals do not make entirely clear what will happen to those routes. It is unclear whether it is proposed to make changes to those routes. I would be saddened to see such a proposal, but it is not ruled out. However, in my view, children and young people should be able to benefit from routes to settlement that are proportionate to their age, to their length of residence and to their strong connection to the UK. One reason the public may not know about this is that the families we are talking about are indistinguishable from anyone you know. They will not be massively visible. There is no point of difference. They are the children at school with my children, and they are the people that we meet every day. If other routes lengthen exponentially and this route remains, it makes no sense for children and young people who can qualify on that route to step off those long routes and benefit from the shorter routes to settlement. I would not advise a client to do that if it is open to them. However, that does not solve all the problems that are available for that affect people who arrived as children. Arbitrary lines in the sand are already within the rules such that a young person who arrived as a child at 12 years and five months will be able to benefit from the half-life route and a shorter route to settlement. However, a child who arrived at 12 years and seven months will not and is then looking down the barrel of a 20 or 30-year route to settlement under these proposals. We need to acknowledge that allowing young people to settle at an early stage offers positive outcomes and makes them more able to achieve their potential. That can only be in the public interest. I do not understand why you would not want that to happen for young people. Consideration needs to be given to extending the availability of a five-year route to settlement for those who arrived as children and to factor into that route provisions that allow young people to have their leave to remain in one chunk so that they are not beholden to two and a half years of fees because it is absolute dumb luck when those two and a half years fall. If that is right in the middle of your exams, it is horrendous. If it is at a point that means you cannot then do a year abroad on your degree, it is not okay. We need to see changes, but I want to keep that private life route and I want more young people to be able to avail themselves of it.

Solange wants to come in.

Thank you. I wanted to add a provision that I did mention earlier, which shows how wise Parliament was in some of the debates in 1981. A provision, section 3(1) of the Act, allows for the Secretary of State to have the discretion to register any child in the UK. That especially includes migrant children who have built a connection in the UK. Ten years being in the UK is normally a good connection for them to be registered by discretion. Also, children can register before then so long as one parent is settled, the other parent is British, and the child has leave to remain. The provision of section 3(1) is, after 10 years, so long as the child and the parents have leave to remain, the child will be registered by discretion. It is a discretion, which means it comes under the huge guidance of the Home Office for registration by children, but it is possible. As long as it does not change because policy guidance changes, it is there at present. That is there because, after PRCBC representing these children, 40 judicial reviews later, the guidance was amended to include, after 10 years and leave to remain, children being able to be registered by discretion. It is there. Let us protect it. Let us speak out for it to carry on because it is a way in for children who are already connected to be registered by discretion. I also wanted to add about Windrush. Windrush was part of the 1981 Act. It provided people who were British subjects from the Windrush countries to register within five years of the introduction of the Act. Sadly, many people were not advised. There was not enough awareness, and the Home Office was also inviting people not to worry about it and saying it would be all right because it did not want to be bombarded with lots of applications. That is how Windrush was born. This is how the entitlements from 1983 that we have now are confronted by all of this. We have 30 and 40 year-olds not being registered by entitlement and being born in the UK.

Anna, what would the consequences be for children whose parents are on a longer route to settlement, say 20 or 30 years, than they are?

As I have mentioned, children access services through the conduit of their parents, so the impact on children of their parents being on lengthy routes to settlement is maintaining those children on those routes to settlement, effectively. If we are looking at 20-year or 30-year routes, that is not just the child’s childhood but potentially their own children’s childhoods as well. It is an artificial approach to treat different members of the same family unit so overwhelmingly differently and to create stress, fear and division. Again, it will mean that family resources, whether they be financial or mental or emotional, are diverted away from what is best for those children and what will bring them most safely to adulthood, and into managing an increasingly unmanageable route to settlement.

Lastly, Chrisann, would retaining the current five-year private life path for children and young people be sufficient for you to address your concerns?

I would very much like it to be retained. However, that does not address all the concerns that we have laid down here because it would be short-sighted of me to think just about the children already here. We have to think about the problems that will be caused if these longer routes apply to children who will arrive and children of the future. I feel like the concerns that we are seeing here are a microcosm of a bigger issue in the future when we have waves of young people growing up in the UK with that precariousness. It would not solve the issues that we are dealing with because the heart of it still goes back to the fees, administrative delays, constant renewals and policing. Also, something is quite alarming about having to document every aspect of your life. In some of the cases that we see, it is ridiculous to see people coming in with 200 pages of evidence to prove their right to remain here. You would think that every two and a half years that they would have to prove it less and less, but they still have to supply the same amount of information. Also, it is important to add that while I would love for the five-year route to be maintained because it was so hard won and people are still not getting even that, that is the big thing—they are still not achieving that settlement even if it is there because the goalposts keep moving. Another problem that we see is that just because you have started the route does not mean you stay on it. We have had cases with young people where I would love to see them on their way and say, “Bye. You saw us in 2021”, but some have returned in 2025 to our services saying, “I cannot apply for my next renewal. I have spent four years on this route.” A family came to us after spending eight years on the route and they fell out of status and that clock had to start again. I am sure we will touch on it, but I would like to also bring attention to one key response we keep getting from the Home Office. While there is no fee waiver for settlement, they say that a fee waiver can support families and children if they are on leave to remain and they cannot afford the fees. However, there is a paradox when it comes to the fees because under the fee waiver system, if you manage to be great as a parent and work multiple jobs and manage to save some but not all, you are penalised because you are seen as rich enough not to get a fee waiver but not rich enough to afford the full fees. Currently, we are working with a mother. All her children are now eligible for settlement. She has four children, all under the age of 15. She has saved up £8,000 but she has £4,900 missing, and so she cannot apply for her children to get a settlement even though they have been here for a long time, but she also cannot apply for a fee waiver because she would not meet the affordability lens, even though, ironically, one of the criteria for applying for a fee waiver is if paying for the Home Office fees would cause issues with children’s wellbeing. Since 2020, we have run a support fund, and this provides basic and essential needs to families. We often get applications from children and young people and their families almost immediately after they have done a renewal to the Home Office. Families are asking for the lights to be kept on, for groceries, for their children’s uniforms, basic and essential needs, because they have given it all to the Home Office and they have nothing left for themselves. Five years is not enough when we think about the underlying procedures, the administrative delays and also the high fees. I have never seen anything like it. Home Office fees have increased by over 500% in the last couple of years. While the explanation is we have to maintain the orders and it is a privilege to be here, these children are not going anywhere and so why make it more difficult for them and their families?

The default position in most visas is for application of a condition that prevents an individual having access to public funds. Then there is a change of conditions process to have that condition removed from the leave to remain. That process is by application form and is riven with delays. A need for access to public funds that was not there before might be around an injury at work. If you are a care worker, you are at risk of a back injury and you are then not able to lift and undertake the physical demands of working in care. It may be a mental health crisis. It might be a stroke. We have seen individuals who had been on a route to settlement for a lengthy period and then started experiencing symptoms of dementia. Life happens to people. It could be a car accident. It could be the breakdown of a relationship or the need to escape an abusive relationship. When both partners in a relationship are on the 10-year route to settlement, a domestic violence immediate settlement route is not available. An individual would need to make an application via the change of conditions process to access public funds.

The change of conditions process is not sufficient on its own because of the level of evidence that is required and also the lengthy delays in processing those applications. The application can be made if a person is destitute or at imminent risk of destitution. I am not as across the data on this point as on other areas, but my memory is that the processing time is at least three months on average for those applications to be processed. If you put together all of the evidence and submit your application, you will not be able to access public funds until that condition is removed and then you will have the lead-in time for access to funds such as universal credit, which have a delayed payment period as well.

I would love to come in on that. We are worried about the penalties. They will mean that families do not seek help when they need for children and young people, and we feel that that could escalate the safeguarding issues. They would be reluctant to seek that help if they were in real dire circumstances. We know that that they could seek section 17 assistance from the local authority, but many local authorities do not understand that. Local authority use of section 17 for families is patchy. Also, we know that local authorities are struggling financially as well and so that puts a burden somewhere else. We are worried about what will happen to children and young people if families feel that they cannot seek help with housing if they need to and help with the absolute essentials that they need. That then opens up risks of exploitation as well, and families trying to struggle and cope, building on some of the issues we have already spoken about today about how families are already struggling to manage financially as it is. Those penalties, as we know, could mean years longer, 30 years plus, and so adding those penalties is disastrous for children and young people.

We are already receiving inquiries from individuals we represent who are in receipt of public funds. A former client of ours, an unwell young man, called the DWP to ask if he could pay back his disability benefits so that he would not be penalised in his route to settlement. It is not even in force yet. People know that it will happen and it is hugely stressful. Children will be living below the poverty line for extended periods of time. Families are likely to try to avoid using public funds because of the extension of the route to settlement and that they will live below the poverty line for extended periods of time and be unable to sustain that. They will have to access funds, having spent a long period of time in absolute dire straits, and will then have the extension applied to their route in any event. Having seen how people edit their life to try to succeed on a fee waiver, I have strong concerns about what that will do in real terms for people.

When we talk about poverty, we are not talking about people not being able to afford things. We are talking about that having then consequences on health and wellbeing. We know that families, particularly children and young people, living in poverty have poorer health outcomes. We are already seeing real issues around malnutrition. We are seeing a return to health issues that we saw many years ago in children and young people within the UK generally. We are seeing children being shorter as a result of malnutrition. In early years, particularly in under-fives, that also impacts brain development if children and young people are not getting the right vitamins and minerals for food. We know that that has long-term consequences for health. There are also consequences for what that means for child, young people’s and adult health as we move forward as well. We are particularly concerned about that. We mentioned the poverty strategy, but there is a range of other strategies and policies and it is hard to see how those policies and strategies are being considered with these suggestions. Things like the violence against girls and women strategy, the 10-year health plan, and the poverty strategy that we have already spoken about do not seem to be joined up. Then we talk about the wider Acts such as the Children’s Act. We have real gaps in understanding how all those things come together so that children, young people and families are not falling outside of some of those wider policies.

Yes, we have thought a lot about it. It is deeply problematic. The whole earned settlement or earned loyalty proposals from the Government state that you have to jump through many hoops to prove that you should be here in the UK. It asks a lot of migrant communities about overperformance when it comes to volunteering in your local community. You are a visible part of the community and clearly a good infrastructure for that. At the same time, once you have jumped through all those hoops, at the end of it, you are being told that you do not quite belong and you are not quite permanent, even if you have ILR and settled status. That flies in the face of the promise of settlement. It is about permanence. It is for you to be a fully participating member of a society without any specific conditions. It should not be applied to those with ILR, given all that they had to get through to get to that place of feeling like they truly belong. Also, I am not quite sure of the problem that the Government are trying to solve by doing that.

I agree entirely with what Chrisann has said. We strongly disagree with this proposal. What is the point of settlement if it does not represent safety and stability and parity with other people who are settled and belong in the UK? Many aspects have not been thought through at all. Surely a process would have to be in place to allow access to public funds to comply with Article 8 of the UCHR. If someone has to apply to access public funds, will they be penalised? How do you penalise someone with settlement? Do you unsettle them? What is the proposal? Also, if people have been on a 10-year route to settlement or even a five-year route to settlement and they have paid immigration fees, paid their IHS to the NHS, and paid their taxes throughout that time, and then they get to settlement and still do not have any access to everything that they have paid for, it does not appear fair. I do not know what has been considered about the options for people whose original citizenship is from a nation that does not allow dual citizenship and so they do not even have the option to then become British without losing their original citizenship. Is it intended that this will apply retrospectively? If it is applied retrospectively, you will remove a right from hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of people. If it is not applied retrospectively, you will have people on the same type of leave to remain with entirely different rights and access. Specifically for children and young people who secure indefinite leave to remain, it is evident that their long-term future will be in the UK. Why are we disadvantaging them? Why are we doing this to people who will become citizens and who will contribute to our communities? It is unfathomable. Although the beginning of the proposal makes reference to these proposals not applying to the EUSS or Windrush, how will that work with an application of NRPF to indefinite leave to remain?

I am conscious that we have only 10 more minutes with you and we have a couple more questions, but I have to ask the question. You have presumably made these points to the Home Office. Why is it not listening?

If we knew what that was about, we would be a lot richer than we are.

What are they trying to achieve from these changes?

As mentioned before, even when we present this, some of the case studies that we put in our submission to this Committee we have submitted to the Home Office in our direct bilateral conversations and meetings. There are a few things. One thing I am still trying to grapple with is that idea of public perception. There is a notion of the Government thinking this is what the public want or are asking for. From a lot of the things that we have spoken about here, people would not even think that thousands of children have undocumented status or precarious status. The motivation, though, is what we keep getting. I am sure a lot of us around this table have received the formulaic letters from successive Ministers who basically say, when it comes to the fees, “We have to maintain the borders”. They do not see it as profiteering. They see it as a privilege to be able to stay here and so they can charge you what they want. As well, one cannot ignore what is happening outside of these walls. It is almost a race to the bottom. It misses out on seeing people’s people. A lot of years ago, the Home Office did this whole programme around the face behind the case, the idea being to humanise migrants and applicants. It has lost that and has gone back to the statistical framework. As a result of that, children and young people will be unintended consequences unseen.

Thank you. I will move on to Margaret Mullane. Joani, did you want to come back?

How could the Government’s mandatory minimum criteria be applied to young people? What are your thoughts? They need to qualify for settlement in their own right.

The earnings?

Parents are on the path and they have turned 18.

In this situation, flexibility is key. Children and young people mature at different rates and one size will not fit all. The rules have had flexibility historically and the flexibility should remain. No one should be forced to step out of their family unit if they are not ready to do so. However, if someone is able to access a route that is more beneficial to them for settling earlier, it should be that option should be available to them. Allowing children and young people to take steps towards the form of leave to remain that best allows them to fulfil their potential is in everyone’s interests. Forcing someone to have to do that brings with it a risk of discrimination. We have to acknowledge the stages in people’s lives and the differential earning impact given experience, qualifications, youth unemployment, the fact that you may have been only recently able to access the labour market, and the increased costs of starting your life. It needs to acknowledge the risks that some children and young people face. For instance, a child with serious disabilities may chronologically be an adult but functionally will need ongoing support or an LGBTQ+ child may have been disowned by their family and forced out of their family unit without a safety net. All those aspects need to be considered. Any route needs to be flexible enough to encompass the needs of different shapes and sizes of families and young people.

Thank you. I will move on to transitional arrangements with Robbie Moore.

This question is more addressed to Chrisann and Anna. Would particular issues arise from applying the proposed changes to children and young people who are already in the UK on routes for settlement? This is to do with transitional protections.

Chrisann, do you want to start perhaps and then Anna?

This debate is live. It is live on WhatsApp group chats and in communities. A lot of worry and uncertainty is being felt by communities. If the Government want to pursue this and apply it retrospectively, transitional agreements should secure those already on routes in this country. That is primarily because of a principled view around the rule of law. People need to know where they are with the law. I would also like to present a slippery slope argument that I would like to present. If this is retrospective, it provides dangerous precedent where successive Governments could keep moving the goalpost and that is problematic. The transitional arrangements need safeguards for those already on the route and children and young people. Another thing that needs to be thought about is that, as Anna mentioned, there is no legal aid for this stuff. One thing that has happened we saw when the Home Office transitioned to e-visas and over 3 million people now needed to digitise their status. The deadline kept moving because people do not know that they have to do these things. An issue with that retrospective application is that people would assume at times that surely their rights would remain because the Home Office is not a bad faith actor and the Government are not a bad faith actor, but they would sometimes need legal clarification to prove their rights and entitlements. We do not have that. Implementing retrospective application of this will be extremely dangerous for people who might assume that the usual course of things would happen where in five years they can apply for settlement, only to reach that point and be told no. The Home Office did not send out mass communication that was absolutely clear. The Home Office also does not have what we would describe as a customer service given the high fees that are paid. Legally, it is problematic, but also in certainty it is problematic. If they did go ahead, absolutely, maintain the routes that children and young people now have.

Anna, do you have anything additional to add over and above that?

There is historical precedent for transitional provisions. When the significant changes were brought in that introduced the 10-year route, there were transitional provisions for those on previous routes.

Would you recommend that particular transitional protections are specifically looked at?

My strong recommendation is not to extend the routes to settlement. People’s routes to settlement need to be honoured. They have been sent letters that say, “After a 10-year qualifying period, you will be able to apply for settlement”. Is that not true? As a lawyer, I would argue that they have a legitimate expectation of settlement after 10 years, having been told that. Other groups of people may have legitimate expectations. I also query the lack of a backstop. This will leave people indefinitely on limited leave to remain with no finality. We cannot allow for someone to exist in limbo for decades.

Solange wanted to come in.

Yes, thank you. Not having transitional protection is draconian, unfair, likely to be unlawful, and shows lack of integrity and faith in the system. People have invested emotionally and financially. They should be given what they had expected and what they had invested. It is wrong. It is not negotiable.

Thank you. To finish off, Paul Kohler.

Before I ask my question, I was trying to look up what other countries do with this issue when my phone intervened. Jus soli is still practiced in the Americas, nationality by birth, but not in the rest of the world. How come it can still be practised there but not in the rest of the world, particularly Europe?

I cannot answer that, but I can answer for British nationality law. It is unique. The USA is a different country with different politics and different whatever. I often hear of British values, but comparing with other countries and not looking at the history and the generally what Britain is about including Windrush. PRC’s position is it is the wrong question to ask respectfully and that you cannot compare.

So that ship has sailed and we will never get back to that position of nationality by birth. Is that what you are all telling me in reality?

Yes, let us go back to just every person born in the UK is automatically British but we are where we are. We have a British Nationality Act. We know that Trump is trying to go the same way. We have clearly seen the damage that jus soli has done and I hope that I have given you a little glimpse of that.

I just find it bizarre that 30 countries in the world still practise that and I was wondering how they can but we do not but that is not knowledge that anyone has on the Committee.

I am afraid the Home Office keeps me busy with UK law and I have not managed to get my head around that.

No, that is a fair point. Anna. You have made the point that these proposals will hardly help what is already a dysfunctional Home Office function. Can you outline why?

The current system is not working effectively. The Home Office is not efficient and there is a significant delay in all the applications that I submit to the Home Office. I find it entirely normal for people to wait 10 to 12 months for leave to remain applications. Opportunities for efficiencies are lost. A person who applies to extend their existing leave must fill in the same form as the person putting in their original application right from the start and there is duplication of evidence all the way through. We are in a situation where that system is inefficient and ineffective and ridden with delay. Then if we are going to increase the number of people who are making those very frequent applications with evidence that needs to be considered we are extending the length of the route. We are finding every opportunity to double the volume of applications that an already struggling organisation is not putting through in reasonable time. The complexity of the provisions as suggested with maths boggles my mind with adding one year and taking off five and putting on another six years and do not pass go and do not collect £200. I am not convinced by the decisions I get from the Home Office now that the decision makers there are capable of making lawful decisions on such a complex set of provisions in which circumstances we will then see the impact on courts of resolving those, whether that be through a right of appeal or potentially through the need to bring judicial review challenges to incorrect grants of incorrect lengths of leave with incorrect conditions applied and incorrect information about when the next time the merry go round starts will be. I think there is a high risk of systemic failure and exacerbating the current situation both at the Home Office and before the courts.

I totally agree with Anna that that will just compound what is already unworkable and is a costly system. I believe it will increase the cost but ultimately children and families that we support will be further impacted by this. The children and young people will be the ones who suffer. I think it is an additional cost to the fiscal purse that is not needed.

We have very complex immigration rules. Lawyers talk about them, lawyers struggle with them, the courts struggle with them and we are adding more and more. The application procedure is very complicated, long-winded and just very expensive for all. There are things such as biometrics, long-winded forms, evidence, right to rent, not right to rent, applications to right to rent. It is just mind boggling and it needs to be simplified so that we can all know where we are and how to do things.

Thank you very much to the panel for your answers to our questions. I know this has been a long session but there was a lot that we wanted to cover and you have been incredibly helpful in informing us. Thank you once again. I will now suspend the session for a short while to change over the panels. Witnesses: Peter Wieltschnig, Professor Martin Green OBE and Matthew Percival.

I welcome our second panel. We are looking at the impact of the proposed changes to medium-skilled workers and I will ask our panel to introduce themselves, starting with Peter.

Good afternoon. My name is Peter Wieltschnig. I am Policy Lead on Employment Rights and Labour Markets at Trades Union Congress.

Matthew Percival, Policy Director at the Confederation of British Industry.

I am Martin Green. I am the Chief Executive of Care England. We are a representative body for care providers.

Thank you very much. We will start our questions with Paul Kohler.

Matthew, how will these proposed changes affect planning for businesses and their strategies going forward?

When I think about how these changes will have impact, there is a direct cost impact on businesses. If they need to sponsor a worker for longer, if the worker was going to stay for a longer time anyway, a longer time sponsored means a greater cost to the business at that total time. That can be a factor for how affordable that is for the company. There can also be an impact on the worker side of the psychology that impacts the business which is if the worker may also face those costs for a longer time there may be less willingness and less attractiveness to come to the UK. There is a lot of focus in the debate of how we decide which people we want to admit to the UK but where there are some highly skilled people that are sought after and could get job offers in multiple markets how do we make it attractive for them to come to the UK? That again will be an impact on the businesses. Maybe they will not be able to get the candidate they want if it is not as attractive to the candidate any more. I think that does feed through into business decision making and what will be the impact of those higher costs. We are in a cost of doing business crisis at the moment and that feeds through. We are seeing it in the labour market already. Business investment intention, skills intention, where businesses are struggling to find the money to keep turning over their operations then adding an extra cost on to them for whatever reason can have unintended consequences. We are long past the point where a cost incentive could encourage a business to do a positive thing or what you would want them to do. We are at the point where businesses often have very great incentives already to do the sorts of things such as investment in skills where the absence of that skill is the reason for going to the international market in the first place. If businesses are struggling to afford that already then an extra period of fees and charges can give them less capacity to invest in the alternatives, whether it is technology adoption, skills or any other form of productivity improvement for their UK workforce. You can end up with a greater incentive than ever to act and less capacity to do so because your incentives have gone too far.

We have heard from other witnesses previously that extending to 15 years will not affect the draw of the UK. Would you argue with that?

Do you mean the attractiveness of the UK to a worker?

Yes.

I am not normally the authority on workers’ perspectives of things so I do not want to speak for Peter in that regard. Our members would certainly report where there is greater uncertainty and cost for workers they are looking to bring to the UK that has an influence on people’s choices if that person has multiple markets they could choose to go to. Do they choose to come to work in the UK or one of our other competitors?

I am happy to come in. I think it would undoubtedly affect people’s choice to come to the UK. There are a number of reasons for that. Of course workers would be expected to pay a significant and repeated cost of the duration of that time and this can be £15,000 to £20,000 and as well £15,000 to £20,000 for any dependent, adult or child, can potentially be racked up as well, potentially meaning that they could face very high costs just for the privilege to work in the UK at a time when they could potentially have a quicker route to settlement in other countries. The other issue is all the indirect impacts as well. For instance if somebody comes with a child it may have an impact on whether their child would have to pay overseas fees at university or things such as that. The longer-term implications will undoubtedly have a bearing on their decision to migrate to the UK. I will add on workers already in the UK. We have heard of significant concerns that they are considering leaving the UK due to these policies and that is even before they have been implemented. Unite the Union did a survey of 1,300 migrant workers and a quarter already announced that this had significantly impacted them or convinced them to leave the UK. The Royal College of Nursing has also highlighted that a significant number of nurses are also considering leaving the UK as well and certainly 49% had concerns about their career. Of course if they are thinking of the time that they spend in the UK and whether that is worth their while in their ability to integrate, whether it is worth their while for the ability to advance their career, this will undoubtedly have an impact.

Martin, in the care industry what effect are these proposals having on workforce planning in the care sector?

It will have a huge effect, and partly that is because we have a significant number of overseas staff and we also have a significant number of vacancies. The last data told us there are about 131,000 vacancies. We had a very successful time when we recruited a lot of people from overseas and they worked extremely well and I think you should also acknowledge that in some areas it is very difficult to get home grown staff so often they were plugging gaps in particular geographical areas. Another element of this, which links to what both Matthew and Peter have said, is one of the challenges is that in social care you will not be able to develop your career during those 15 years so what will happen is you will arrive and you will be at a point and that is where you stay so you cannot then progress your career. If you are looking at the attractiveness of the UK what that will mean is people might think, “Well, if I do 15 years in Australia I can develop my career and then if I do want to go back I will go back at a much more senior level” so I think there are some significant challenges that are particular to the care sector with this legislation. There are also, as both Matthew and Peter have said, very significant cost increases. For example for one of my members, who has about 10% of overseas staff, if you increase this to a 15-year timeline this is putting about £1,500,000 extra just in the transactional costs of managing that process. These will be serious impediments, first, for individuals making the decision to come to the United Kingdom and, secondly, it will be an impediment to businesses when they think about whether to develop a new service in an area where they know it is difficult to get staff and they might then decide not to develop a service there. This might produce some care deserts in some areas. The implications of this approach in this new legislation are quite significant and particularly significant for care providers.

Could you explain so we are all clear why you cannot progress your career under the 15-year rule?

Yes. What they are saying is that in effect you arrive, you have a role and then for 15 years you are in that role. For example normally, particularly in a sector where you have a 30%-plus turnover rate, you would normally see in 15 years people would move significantly through their career. For example I have known people who have started as care workers and then they have become registered managers in the space of about four years. If that opportunity is cut off to people coming in from overseas that will make it very unattractive to come to the United Kingdom as opposed to going to another jurisdiction where you might be able to develop your career. Not only are you developing your career but of course you are developing your remuneration package alongside your career. I think in saying that we cannot have career progression until we have gone through this process that is probably one of the biggest impediments for people coming to the UK. I want to reiterate with 131,000 vacancies with a turnover rate of 30%-odd with areas where it is particularly difficult to recruit from the home market these will have a significant impact on care.

Looking at the other side of the coin, talking about shortages in the domestic workforce, are the Government doing enough to upskill the domestic workforce and fill these areas?

No. One of the other things that I think is quite shameful is that the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England have done workforce strategies for the NHS. What they have done is a career pathway for social care but they have not done a proper strategy for the workforce. Thankfully and I want to pay tribute to colleagues at Skills for Care, they have developed one but they have developed it outside government. We have people sitting behind desks that have titles such as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and Minister for Health and Social Care and yet they have decided to develop a workforce strategy for one bit of the system and ignore the other. Similarly in this legislation there is a very clear division between what is allowable in the NHS and what is allowable in social care. If we are told, and we are told constantly, that these are interdependent systems why do we have such a differentiation in the way policy is being developed?

Is the only way to address those issues to sort out social care?

Absolutely. One of the things that people have forgotten is in 1948 when the NHS was founded people had an intervention and they came out either cured or dead, having gone to the hospital. Now the challenge of the 21st century is long-term conditions and long-term conditions cannot be cured. That is why social care is so important. Social care is the element that helps people live well with a long-term condition and hopefully in living well they not only reduce the burden on the NHS but they live active, productive and perhaps economically productive lives that they would not be able to do without social care. This seems to be missing in the policy agenda.

On the skills issue beyond the care sector are the Government doing enough to develop skills in the domestic workforce?

One of the unfortunate situations that we have now is that it is probably a riskier time to start up a new apprenticeship scheme if you are a large employer paying the growth and skills levy, formerly the apprenticeship levy, than it has been at any point since the scheme was first created. What I mean by that is with a lot of investments there is always a set-up cost and there is a payback over a period of time and if you are going to set up a new method of developing your workforce, a new apprenticeship entry route into an area of your business that you did not have before, your pay off is probably wanting to make at least a medium if not a long-term commitment to it and see it pay off over time. The instability that exists at the moment within the apprenticeship system means that a number of employers are saying, “We would look at this but we need to exercise a risk premium for not knowing when, if or whether the Government are going to change the rules from under our feet”. They did it a year ago; they have done it again at the Budget. That is two Budgets in a row where employers have found the rules change under their feet to say something that was permitted within the apprenticeship system is going to change and be repurposed to go somewhere else and, “If you are going to continue with that find some other money from somewhere”. In an environment where employers are struggling with their cost base that change can lead to cancelling something. Of course Government can make their priorities for how they choose to invest public money. The challenge is that the apprenticeship levy is still spoken about as both a levy on employers to say to them, “You should use this money to invest in the skills of your workforce and if you do not do that then we will recycle the money into employers who are willing to” but at the same time the rules of the system are changed to make sure that if you do find a way to spend money they stop you from doing so because they do not want them to spend it on their workforce. They want them to spend it somewhere else in another part. There is not any general taxation funding for skills. There is a big challenge there and the whole thing is amplified because there is no transparency about where that money goes that is raised not only from the growth and skills levy but from things such as the immigration skills charge. Everybody’s assessment is that there is a significant top slicing of it from the Treasury. A lot of these trade-offs are hundreds of millions of pounds that are collected in the name of skills but do not make it into the skills system at the moment and those are forcing trade-offs that lead to issues such as defunding of certain qualifications. We have seen a couple of rounds of that already and employers are worried about what comes next because everyone can see an environment where there is a skills budget and it is all spent and the Government are talking about where they want to do more. That is a zero-sum game when there is a fixed budget, so everyone is wondering what is about to be cancelled. That has a chilling effect on employer investments that are relying on unlocking the utilisation of the levy that they have paid in that they have seen as a levy and that was telling them that the Government wanted them to invest in skills and this money is set aside to make sure that they do. That is increasingly not the case.

We are getting off subject. Is there a TUC perspective?

We agree with providing investment training and opportunities for the domestic workforce but we need to think about the strategies that are bringing this forward. We need to see these jobs plans emerge. We look forward to seeing them and we look forward to seeing them soon. The other point is that we need to make sure that these roles are attractive to the domestic workforce. We need to make sure that there are conditions and pay that make people want to join these sectors in the first place. We know that adult social care has one of the highest vacancy rates or the highest vacancy rate for sectors in the UK and also has a very high churn rate, as Martin mentioned earlier. Measures by this Government, the Employment Rights Act for example, have made provisions to address some of the issues such as zero-hours contracts that are rife in adult social care, but these changes will take some time to bed in and during that time we need to make sure that the workers in the adult social care sector do not have downward pressures on their wages that come from having limited mobility in their profession as a result of immigration policy such as this, which means that they are less equipped to press for higher pay and better conditions in those sectors.

Could one argue that these proposals would incentivise employers to upskill and up wage rates for the domestic workforce?

I think in many instances it is counterproductive to that and there are several reasons for that. One is the high levels of power disparity that result from the sponsorship system in the first place. An employee is reliant on their employer for their salary, sometimes accommodation but also for their ability to remain in the UK in the first instance, which has a significant impact on their leverage in any workplace situation. The other issue is the fact that a lot of workers because of their concerns of retaliation are hesitant to engage in trade union activity in their workplace to improve pay and conditions

Is the argument not that if you make it harder to recruit from overseas you might incentivise employers to do more with regards to the domestic workforce? Is that not the argument you might hear?

It is the argument you might hear but unfortunately one of the challenges is that the commissioning process does not enable you to do that. If you look at the data that has been delivered by the Homecare Association they have shown that some local authorities are commissioning home care at a point where it is not even covering statutory requirements. In fact they have said that some local authorities might be complicit in modern slavery in that they are commissioning at levels that are not delivering what you need to give people what is required at the moment, never mind what you would like to give them. I think one of the challenges is that if we are going to engage with the home workforce we must understand first that this is not a numbers game. It is a very complex role to be in social care. Not everybody can do it. You need not only skills but the right values. If you have somebody in that position you need to then train and develop them but it is very difficult then to do a remuneration package that is appropriate to that because the funding levels and particularly the disparity between the funding levels in the NHS compared to social care does not allow you to do that. We find a lot of our staff get good quality grounding in social care and then they move into roles in the NHS because of the pension scheme, because of the hourly rates, because of the amount of money spent on training. For example the NHS spends £100,000 a minute on training. In an integrated system that money would be available for the system right across health and social care but it sits in a silo for health and one of the things that I think we need to do to make this an attractive profession is to have some clear workforce strategies to enable them to be about an integrated system, both health and social care. We need to remunerate people properly with proper skills and competency frameworks and also payment frameworks but that will not be achieved when you have this vast disparity between the funding pots and social care always underfunded. In fact, in the fair pay agreement the Government have already identified the quantum, which is about £500 million. That will do very little to significantly improve terms and conditions. I appreciate this is a journey and there will be some collective bargaining happening every year and the Government will deliver a quantum, but what that tends to do is put this into the piecemeal one step at a time unconnected with each other rather than saying, “Let’s have a proper workforce strategy. Let’s integrate it with the NHS and health workforce. Let’s remunerate people properly. Let’s use the money that is available for training across the system.” If we did that I think we would then make it a much more attractive destination for people in social care and health because people would develop their careers.

When you take it outside the private sector it is a different dynamic in that the terms and conditions are not set with a ceiling from government in those private environments. This is my point around the concern of you are almost looking for a Goldilocks amount of pressure to apply on to a company. How much pressure do you apply to give them an incentive to act in a different way, a way that you would prefer they act but where they still have the capital available to make the investment to achieve that change? I am suggesting we are a long way past that point already. There is not a company that does not have an incentive already to pursue alternatives. Often you will find the companies that are making use of visas already have well above average investment in domestic skills as well. It is not that they are going for one or the other; it is a deep frustration when the line about cheap foreign labour comes out because it is far from cheap. You already have protections in there to make sure that the wages are the same as the domestic workforce, and then on top of that you have all the fees and charges that under this environment have the potential to last for longer as well. You already have a strong incentive but a wider cost environment for business is seeing things such as skills investment being turned down rather than increased because there just is not the money available when you are thinking about what sort of prices you can put forward to your customers before your customers say, “I would rather not buy that good or that service if it is going to be at that price”. That is the pressure that businesses are increasingly seeing that means if they cannot put the price on to customers and particularly at that mid-skill market you are talking about some very thin margin companies, you have profitability that is at a decade low and therefore there is not an ability to incentivise them more. If anything you need to ease up the pressure a bit so there is an ability to have the capacity to invest.

My final question. In short you are telling me that from both an employee and employer perspective these proposals are not helpful.

I do not think they will deliver a change in the economy that you would hope to see if you wanted it to lead to a pivot towards—

Negative or just neutral?

I think you might see just a decline in activity, which is what we are seeing in a more stagnant labour market emerging as well, right?

Do you all agree with that?

Yes, absolutely.

I would also add the human impact on the workers.

I will follow up on the social care conversation. First, I see in my own constituency and in my personal life the massive contribution of social care workers both UK nationals and foreign nationals and it just cannot be understated. On the topic of why the sector has struggled to recruit domestically, can I put to you an argument that I heard from a migration policy analyst to see what you think about it? They said to me that in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic there was a realisation of a massive shortage of social care workers. I was not an elected politician at the time. The social care sector came to the Government under Boris Johnson with that evidence that was understood and the quid pro quo was, “Allow us to recruit from overseas to plug this gap and we will do the reforms needed going forward”. The Government agreed to their side and opened up massively recruitment from overseas but there was no concomitant reform of the social care sector to improve its recruitment from the domestic workforce. The evidence does suggest that is what has happened. What do you think about that and what would your answer be?

My answer is that the evidence is clear that we have not been able to recruit in the way we would like from the UK workforce but that has nothing to do with the fact that we have not delivered on our side of the bargain. The bargain is not being delivered by Government with the funding package. For example, we have a £230 billion NHS expenditure and social care is about £30 billion. We have serious problems and interestingly not only are we in a space where the government funding is totally inadequate and there is loads of evidence to prove that including things such as the cost of care exercises that were done in the preparation for the implementation of Dilnot which identified what it costs to run care services and we can see that they have not kept pace with that but we have also seen situations where local authorities are so incredibly pressurised. They cannot increase fees appropriately. Another issue that is not well understood is the pressure that puts on self-funders who are constantly being asked to plug the gap. I would say to your analyst that he does not understand how the funding in social care works and if he did understand that he would be able to see that it was not about a short term, “We will get to a position where we will then start recruiting”. Of course we also thought at that point post the pandemic that we might be moving into the Dilnot scenario and we had all planned for that and that may have changed the dynamic around funding at a local authority and at a central government level, but none of those things happened. I would say to your economist that he probably knows half the story.

I want to broaden out a bit to look at the routes to settlement not in the care sector but across the whole local economy. One of the proposals in the consultation is for deductions and the time it takes to get to the route to settlement based on whether your salary is above a threshold, to a threshold, that would speed it up and get you there faster or whether you work in key public sector jobs. What is your assessment of the impact of that on the economy of slowing down the route to settlement particularly at lower income levels? I will open it up to any of you.

I would say that the proposed deductions take quite a narrow understanding of contribution in that sense. I think we do need to take a much more holistic approach to how we understand the contributions that people make at a societal or economic level.

The consultation does involve other metrics as well such as volunteerism but I am asking specifically about the salary thresholds and working in the public sector.

I do not think you can necessarily equate contribution in that sense via salary by the total taxable income. Instead I think we need to look at the wider contribution that people make, for instance the positive net fiscal impact that people can make by addressing unmet needs, which can drastically change how we view this equation in the first place as well as how narrowly we set these exceptions for the deductions by what specific roles we have. We do not want to separate out public service workers by professional registration or pay and I would be concerned about the message that also sends to the wider workforce particularly in these low paid sectors. Again, any doctor, any nurse, any teacher, is dependent on a wider ecosystem of support whether that is tech staff, cleaners, somebody manufacturing devices for greater use. It does need to be considered in a much more holistic sense than selecting a couple of narrow roles.

There are always odd outcomes whenever you pick these binary points and some of the things we have our eye on are where you are decoupling that earned settlement maybe for the main visa holder versus a dependent. You could also have some slightly odd situations where you will end up with, say, the shape of that family having an impact on how they get to settlement where if you looked at the household level they would look the same but the structure of it could lead to some very different outcomes. Two people, both working, earning above that first salary threshold would both get a deduction but if one of them had higher earnings and maybe those higher earnings were facilitated by, say, a greater share of the informal childcare or other caring responsibilities being taken on by the other partner, you end up finding one person’s route to settlement is negatively impacted by how that family structures themselves. It is those odd situations that can affect how individuals will then experience this new system. Something that is quite concerning is around the mid-skilled market, which I know you have asked us to focus on. It is not in the proposal; it is in a question at the end. The optimist in me hopes that it is saying, “This is the system and we are asking if we should change the system to put this in it or not” rather than the 15-year being the default. If we end up with a situation where we are measuring economic contribution principally through salary and therefore through tax paid and yet on that measure we are saying because someone’s job is skill level 5 rather than skill level 6, a skill level 5 person earning £90,000 a year is deemed to have less of an economic contribution than a skill level 6 person earning £52,000 a year, you would be thinking, “Hold on. That is a bit odd. The other person has paid more tax but purely with this arbitrary line of skills they have fallen foul of the fact that we are only measuring one thing here.” When the outcomes can be as stark as you end up with a 10-year deduction, a five-year difference in your route to settlement, that would feel like quite an odd outcome if the difference was our measurement of their economic contribution. I think that some of these things can be tweaked. The principle around the idea that settlement is earned through meeting a series of criteria I do not think needs to be that controversial. You already had to meet certain criteria. It was already earned to some extent but we just did not call it that but it is where these bars are set. At the moment they are being tied to tax thresholds as well but those tax thresholds can change. It has been clear that it is not necessarily that they will be tied to those in the future. Are they necessarily the right place to put these thresholds simply because they happen to be the tax thresholds at the moment? It feels like a weak logic if we are already saying, “We are not going to tie it to those tax thresholds in the future”. It shows that we do not think the tax thresholds were a key point for inflection for that decision.

What about the argument that this is about basically fiscal cost, so some people come into the country to do jobs and do it perfectly legally and that is great but there is a point at which you pay in more than you have taken out to the Exchequer and if you are at that level then that is great, you can apply for settlement, you can stay here for as long as you like, but if you are not at that level we need you to pay more in, in tax, before we will let you get there? It is about measuring people’s fiscal cost overall. Do you think that is unfair or is it economically harmful to do that?

I think it is hugely problematic, because it entirely depends on what sort of tax and benefit system governments construct. Obviously that changes over time but the main driver of why most migrants are seen to be a fiscal cost is because most Brits are too. The assumption is that once you start passing through, say, a child of a migrant, what is the fiscal impact of them having a child, the fiscal impact of them having a child is seen to be broadly the same as a Brit having a child but the way we have constructed tax and benefit systems to be progressive means that most people do not meet the bar of making a net contribution. You start to construct a really high bar in a world where we have deliberately made a political choice to make tax and spend very progressive and it then becomes very hard to meet that bar and it could continue to change over time in a different environment and suddenly what meets a net fiscal cost or not could be a very different calculation. That is what makes it quite problematic.

It is not banning people who do not meet the fiscal cost from getting it; it is just extending the time period.

I would return to the point about the positive net fiscal impact that can be made by workers meeting that unmet need in the first place and how that can be seen to reduce costs in a wider sense. The other thing that I would flag is the equalities implications for that and where we are setting these levels in the first place. For instance, the deduction in time for the £50,270 or something along those lines if you earn that salary, the difficulty that poses or the concerns that poses for what happens if somebody has caring responsibilities, disabilities, it is not necessarily in people’s gift to earn £50,000-plus regardless of whether they would like that or not. There are concerns about the equalities impacts as well and how we construe these various metrics by which we assess deductions.

If you take account of the fact that some people are coming to do roles that are absolutely essential and we cannot recruit from the in-country population then the costs of people for example going into crisis and then going into acute hospitals and so on are significant. If we only look at the amounts of money people pay in tax then you lose the amount of contribution and savings they can make for the system generally. I think it is a very crude measure.

That brings me on to my next question, which is I accept your argument that if you only look at income to speed you up through the settlement process then that would be very crude but from what I understand in the consultation it is just adding that in as another element, so it is multiple things you could do to speed your way through it. Are you doing a job that is critical to the public service? Are you contributing to your community and volunteering in other ways? This is another one and it would be a points-based system you might call it where as you accrue the points you move through it more quickly.

Yes, but of course some social care services will not be as recognised as the NHS for example so why should a public sector just because it is public sector get more Brownie points than somebody who might be delivering something to somebody who is in great need but doing it through a charity or a private company?

That was going to be exactly my question back to you, which is what adjustments would you want to see made for the system to work like that?

My view is if we are going to do this for both health and social care we need a level playing field for both and it should not be a position where just because you work in the NHS you get an enhanced position than if you work outside. It should be about what you do and the importance of what you do and what you contribute, not who your employer is.

I understand the logic of your point there but do you think that it is within the wit of the Home Office or any Government Department to design a system that could be that tailored or what do you think would be a good proxy to use? If not your salary, if not the employer, unless you go out and do a job analysis of every single job in the economy what would be a good proxy?

You have hit the nail on the head. It is nearly impossible to do and certainly in answer to the question if I think it is in the wit of the Home Office the answer is no.

We get that a lot.

I think you will also find that it will be in other areas of public service as well beyond just care. It will come up anywhere where you have the private sector playing a role in supporting the delivery of public services. The question will be will that criteria that says you get to settlement quicker because your role was pivotal to the delivery of public services apply to you because your employer was a public sector employer or will it also apply to you because you were working for a private company that was delivering an element of those services on behalf? Then you end up getting differential outcomes depending on whether your money comes straight from government or government outsourced it to somebody else to deliver that on behalf under a contract. You get some of those quirks that would need to be worked through so that we do not get some perverse outcomes. The other thing I would think about is some of the dependencies between different sectors. Some of the ways you will find an impact will be if it impacts you very directly but if I said to you that maybe if something affected some of the logistics suppliers that were involved in some of the supply chains to some of the public services, if suddenly that was dysfunctional, the front line gets hit in a number of ways and companies also find that in this distinction where you talk about some of the highest paid and highest skilled. I will put it in an example that is often used for the sorts of people we want to attract, such as world-leading scientists to come to do research and development in the UK. Often it is hard to make the case to bring that person in if they do not have the confidence to come into the UK. They are also going to have the best in class lab techs and support team they need to deliver that work and so some of the dependencies it is not quite as simple as saying, “These are the people we want and these are the people that we do not” because often the dependencies between them means that you can only have one if you also have some accommodation and confidence around the other.

I will come on to transitional protections and the impact on workers but if I can just ask a very quick follow-up on the thing about salary thresholds. Do you think there is a differential regional impact on this? I am thinking of parts of the country such as mine, Sunderland, that I represent clearly has a relatively low wage, low cost base economy. Do you think there is a risk that the proposed changes would drive migrants to move to, say, London and the south-east where they are more likely to hit salary thresholds? Professor Green, I think you mentioned about care deserts previously and do you think there is a risk that in other parts of the country we would have potential care deserts?

I think that is a very important point. As a northerner myself I know this divide between the affluent south-east and other parts of the country and I think that would be an impediment to people going to those areas. That is where I think we might well see care deserts particularly because there is not, for example, the number of self-funders that would then attract people to be able to pay much more so people coming in would get those higher salaries. I think the regional aspects of this need to be very carefully thought through.

I agree. I think it is a fiendishly complicated problem to try to get around. I have seen this debate come up on a number of occasions around salary thresholds. You tend to find towards the lower end of the labour market the differences between regions is much smaller but as you accelerate further up then there becomes a greater regional impact. If you think about things such as minimum salaries you do on an occupational level for jobs where they are now getting right up to medium wages, even there you start to get problems of some areas of the country getting access to a particular type of worker where an employer in another area cannot and how that impacts some of your growth decisions. If you were to try to say that you could have a visa to be able to bring someone in to work in a city, a northern city, how you design that system and also prevent them from going somewhere else is very complicated.

Let us move on. Clearly the proposal as it stands would apply to people already in the UK and we have talked a bit about that already. Even if the Government were to make these changes for future migrants do you think there should be transitional protections for people who are already in the UK and if so what do you think they should look like?

Certainly our position is that the Government should retain the five-year route and halt any plans towards retrospectivity. If the Government do proceed with the implementations of any of these proposals there are certain cohorts that do need to be particularly protected as well who are made vulnerable by longer stints of time on the route to settlement. I would select a couple of different cohorts but by no means exhaustive and that would include survivors of trafficking, survivors of domestic violence, pregnant workers and recent parents. Part of the reason for this is many of these workers who will have been in extremely traumatic situations or will have undergone significant levels of abuse or exploitation will not be in a position to meet some of the contributions or criteria required under these proposals for deductions and therefore would have to go through significant periods before they have any sense of stability that is necessary for their recovery. When I mentioned pregnant workers and recent parents, one thing that has been flagged to us by UNISON has been the fact that they have been concerned about bad employers firing workers or not renewing sponsorship because that worker has become pregnant and then that leaves them in a situation with 60 days to find a new sponsor willing and able to hire them while being heavily pregnant. Already we know that protections for pregnant workers are necessary for the wider community but with this particular vulnerability created by the sponsorship system.

I will come back on worker protections in a minute, if I may, Peter. On the wider point around transitional protections not necessarily for specific groups but for people existing in the UK who came to the UK on the promise of a five-year route to ILR and Mr Percival and Professor Green, do you have a view on transitional protections for those people in general?

My view is that they came under that understanding and we should hold that line and then if there are new positions and new approaches then we should make that for the people coming in now. My view is that people who came in on the basis of it being a five-year process should have that respected.

I think the greater the deviation from what they were expecting the greater the case for a transitional measure. Somebody coming in on a skilled worker visa will have less impact if they are RQF 6 than below, right, so the transitional measures have greater strength to their importance potentially depending on how big that change would be. I guess the question to ask would be if the retrospective application of the rules led to a proportion of those workers deciding that this is not working for them any more and they were to leave would that be something that we would be comfortable with? That could lead to some significant gaps in important workforces.

There has been some suggestion and the Home Office consultation talks about a potential mixture of different options including extending the no recourse to public funds conditions. There has been some suggestion that there could be a retention of the current route to settlement, the five-year path of ILR but an extension of no recourse to public funds conditions for people granted ILR. Do you have a view on the potential merits of that approach?

My view is that it would be very difficult to implement. You would have to have a situation where you would be able to track the person and then for example how would you manage the access to things such as the NHS? I was in at my doctor the other day and there was a lovely sign that said, “You do not need to prove your address. You do not need to prove your status. You do not need to prove anything. You can get treatment from here.” Well, how do we know that that person would be entitled or not? I think it is very complicated to administer and the more complicated it is the evidence suggests the less it will be able to be administered and what we will then find ourselves doing is spending huge amounts of money policing something that we cannot police.

Thank you. I will come back to the impact on workers and, Peter, perhaps you first. On the implications for workers if they have to maintain a sponsored visa for 15 years or longer and I think you alluded before and I have also heard some stories of sponsoring employers using sponsor status as a lever in a pretty unscrupulous way in certain circumstances over the worker, do you think if there was an extension of the pathway to settlement there is a case for reform of the sponsorship system potentially to decouple it from a particular specific employer?

Certainly. So as I mentioned earlier the significant power imbalance that is created by the sponsorship system means that workers are basically at the behest of their employer and any situation that leads a worker constantly earning or any person constantly earning their right to be able to challenge their employer safety is a recipe for undercutting wages. It is a race to the bottom for pay and conditions. UNISON have campaigned for a sector-wide sponsorship for adult social care as a way of decoupling this link to the employer, which I think would go some way towards making sure that workers could move freely and move towards any employer with better conditions. One thing that a number of other countries have is some sort of bridging visa system. For instance the Republic of Ireland has the employment reactivation permit. In Australia there is the workplace justice visa, which allows a worker who has experienced some form of exploitation from their sponsoring employer to be able to transition to a new visa to somewhat stabilise their migration status so they are able to challenge their exploitative employer. In the Irish example one thing that is interesting is the fact that where the worker has lost their employment through no fault of their own, for instance if their employer went bankrupt or something along those lines, and certainly if any of you are familiar with the explosion of human trafficking cases in adult social care over the last couple of years this was something that was a massive concern, employers losing their sponsorship licence, employers going bankrupt and then those workers, often called displaced workers, were left destitute as a result of that, which was a massive concern. I think there is a certainly a serious argument for reforming the sponsorship system to address these drivers of exploitation that are baked into it.

Professor Green, do you have any view on sector specific sponsorship as opposed to employer?

My view is if you are going to do that you would have to find a mechanism to fund it because it then disincentives people who are employers from funding it because you would not have the link to the person so there would be less incentive to engage with the process because you might find that you are paying a certain amount to get somebody a visa or a possibility of entry and then they will go to another employer. There would have to be a mechanism to fund it. Of course the other issue is about people who, exactly as Peter said, have to move to other employers through no fault of their own. Of course there has been a significant amount of money put into local authorities to do some of that work in a clearing house, in effect, but nobody seems to know where that money has gone and nobody seems to have any data about how many people have been supported by that. Often it is very difficult for people who are in that position to know who to contact to then be able to access this resource to then find another employer.

On that, the Work Rights Centre did some analysis on these rematching hubs in the adult social care sector. I do not think it was the full scope of rematching hubs if I remember correctly but they found that only 4% of the people who came forward were rematched as a result of that.

So would you say that when migrants lose their sponsor through no fault of their own at the moment the support is sufficient? Does the system work for those people?

I do not think it does. Peter is probably better to say rather than me but I do not think it does.

I think there are significant risks of destitution. There are significant risks of workers falling out of status and becoming undocumented and being at incredibly high risk of exploitation.

From an employer perspective a system built around employer sponsorship was not an employer-designed system. That was Home Office-designed to be able to get employers to do more of the heavy lifting around enforcement. If you were going to grant status to individuals rather than to a specific employer the Home Office would lose the ability to make somebody else responsible for making sure that compliance with the visa—the Home Office have to take that on themselves so you would need the resourcing to be able to do that and it is how you would design a system that would work if you were to say it was going to have an enforcement mechanism. When we have looked at sector sponsorship before the Home Office has tended to say, “Okay, so which sector employer body are we making accountable for whether the visas are complied with?” Now, if you were suddenly to make Martin’s criminal status dependent on whether or not every one of his member’s workers complied with their visa terms it is a very untenable position for any sector body to be as well. You would have to have a sea change from holding an employer responsible for the compliance with visa terms of their workers to the Home Office doing it directly and it would be whether the Home Office was ready, willing and able to do that or not to make that work. Employers would not have a problem with the idea that someone is not tied to it but it would have to address the idea that fees are paid up front by one person you might not end up working for, but that is not an insurmountable policy design problem.

Very quickly, Peter, did UNISON have any answer to these criticisms of sector-wide sponsorship?

I cannot speak on behalf of UNISON but certainly I can come back with further information.

If you could let us know, that would be very helpful. I know we have a hard stop at 5 pm, so I want to thank you very much for being our second panel today. You have been incredibly informative. I will bring this session to a close.