Secretary Shabana Mahmood granted migrant care workers a reprieve from plans for tighter immigration rules, but stopped short of reversing controversial proposals to make wider reforms apply retroactively.

The plan announced last year for so-called “earned settlement,” which would see the base timeline migrants have to stay in the country before they can claim settled status extended to 10 years from five, will proceed and will apply to those already waiting, Mahmood said Monday. The proposals include reductions for the well-paid and some who work in the public sector.

Crucially, in an effort to defuse a brewing rebellion within her own governing Labour Party, Mahmood conceded migrants who’d come to work in social care, looking after the elderly and vulnerable, could stay on a five-year path, subject to conditions. Those are that they should have arrived before May 2025, when she first outlined her proposals, and earned a minimum of £25,000 ($33,546) in the 12 months prior to their application. Under the original plan, they had faced an extension to 15 years.

“Britain welcomes those who want to contribute to this country and build a better life,” Mahmood wrote in the foreword to her proposal document. The plan is “fair to those who come here and play their part,” and to the “British people,” she said.

Mahmood’s concession comes after more than 100 Labour Members of Parliament threatened to vote against the government’s reforms, saying it was unfair to move the goalposts for migrants already in the UK who had come on the assumption they’d be able to claim indefinite leave to remain within five years. Securing that status would allow them to claim a wider range of welfare benefits and, if entering on a visa tied to one industry, work outside that sector.

The government received more than 200,000 responses to its consultation on its proposals, and has been processing them for almost nine months. On Monday the Home Office also: The Home Office estimated that under the plans, 500,000 people will have to wait longer than they would have. An official said this would bring billions of pounds off the welfare bill, though a precise number would not be released until an impact assessment is published.

Of those, around 230,000 would be people who arrived on a skilled worker visa but earn less than £50,270, such as butchers and chefs, around 100,000 would be care workers and their dependents who earn less than £25,000, and the remainder would be refugees.

Mahmood will hope the reprieve for carers is enough to dodge a full-blown rebellion from Labour backbenchers. But several are still unhappy about the principle of retroactive changes applying to other workers also, and could still mount a challenge to the plans.

“Recognizing the need to retain our care workers as the bedrock of a new national care service is crucial, but the skilled worker visa covers everyone from nurses to vets,” said Neil Duncan Jordan, an MP on the left of the Labour party. “Changing the rules once someone is already here is simply wrong and the home secretary needs to consider the signal this sends to those who are already contributing to our economy.”Mahmood first announced her plans to reform the immigration system under former Prime Minister Keir Starmer in 2025, at a time when Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party Reform UK was leading in the polls.

While Reform has since fallen behind Labour under new Prime Minister Andy Burnham, immigration remains a top priority among voters, and Farage is poised to attack the government on any sign of perceived weakness in its resolve to bring down immigration numbers.

Nevertheless, Labour has made advances. Legal migration has tumbled following limitations already imposed by the government on visa routes, with a net 171,000 people arriving in the country in the 2025 calendar year, compared to a peak of 944,000 in the year to March 2023. Attention is now focused on irregular migrants arriving via small boats across the English Channel, a flow that has also come down over the past year.

The fall in levels of legal migration gave Mahmood the flexibility to exempt care workers from her “earned settlement” reforms. But the concession is still a blow to her plans — part of the reason she originally proposed such a lengthy settlement timeline for carers was due to the sheer number who’d arrived in recent years, and the concern they would soon be eligible for welfare benefits.

Some 250,000 people arrived on the Health and Care Visa from 2022 to 2025, Mahmood said, amid a staffing shortage post-Brexit. The roles are mostly low-paid, with much of the UK’s social care funded by the state.

The Home Office was also concerned that when those workers were able to escape the conditions of their Health and Care Visa, many would attempt to find better-paid jobs in other industries, leaving fresh vacancies in the beleaguered social care sector.

The government has estimated that the overall lifetime fiscal cost associated with care workers expected to settle in the UK between 2026 and 2030 would be £10 billion, largely due to their low pay. However that methodology didn’t factor in how much it would cost to replace those workers with British staff.

The Institute for Public Policy Research, a think tank, has also found that using the same methodology, skilled migrants and their dependents due to settle under current rules would contribute £115 billion ($154 billion) more than they cost over their lifetime.