UK Earned Settlement Reform: Will Settlement Take 10 Years?
The Home Secretary’s Reforms
Last year we learned about the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s plans for “earned settlement”, which will require something more onerous than normal settlement as it is now. The proposals are not clear so far but this may evidently require longer periods than at present; the relevant consultation has just finished.
The scheme for settlement is relatively simple at the moment: in many cases five years – for example with working visas and family visas – but in some other cases less or more. “Earned settlement” seems to be to do with doing things that are better or beyond the average – like earning big salaries or contributing to volunteering – and it seems that there will in the future be a wider range of settlement periods, in some cases up to ten years but in other cases even more.
You can have a look at:
Closed consultation: Earned settlement
As we say, the proposals are not clear so far but we do get some idea.
On a rather different topic it is incidentally interesting to see how Shabana Mahmood has changed over the last few years, and she was in the past evidently somewhat different from how she described herself in the above consultation. The internet shows that at some point in 2014 she was a stanch and impassioned Pro-Palestine demonstrator in Birmingham (where she was and is an MP) but she seems to have moved on now and is in dispute with the High Court as to whether Palestinian Action should be a proscribed organisation or not. It is extraordinary and difficult to account for.
Anyway, we are where we are, and Ms Mahmood’s recent activities are part of a “double whammy”, the other part being changes to the appeal tribunal structure, some more details of which have emerged.
Appeals are to be revamped and speeded up and in the process the First-Tier Immigration Tribunal is going to be renamed, which of course always makes a difference. A lot more judges (or should we say “adjudicators”) are going to be appointed – with presumably lower qualifications – and a lot more appeals are going to be heard and more quickly.
Many people of many different types have complained that the appeals scheme is overburdened, so perhaps they should not complain too much. The appeals backlog is apparently now at the remarkably high level of at least 100,000, which cannot be good, and surely something had to be done.
Whether Ms Mahmood’s proposed changes to immigration law are good or bad must be in the eye of the beholder but it is fair to say that a lot of people are unhappy about it, not least because of the retrospective element. But the changes to the appeal system are more difficult to measure, and we must wait and see how they work out in practice.
Oliver Westmoreland
Senior Immigration Lawyer
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