Care workers and their dependants will retain a five-year route to settlement, subject to conditions, after Labour pressure prompted Home Secretary Mahmood to soften planned immigration rules. Sadiq Khan welcomed the concession, while City Hall assesses its implications for London’s workforce.

The Mayor of London had opposed “changing rules retrospectively” and called for a “compassionate” immigration policy. Criticism from MP Diane Abbott, the mayor and senior ministers helped secure the change, allowing care workers to remain on their original pathway.

“I welcome the changes the Home Secretary has made,” Khan said. “We’ll be assessing her announcement in terms of how it affects various sectors in London. It’s important for me to recognise the movement there’s been from them.”

The concession addresses the length of the wait for settlement for those covered, but its reach in the capital remains difficult to quantify. There is currently no dataset showing how many people in London have been, or may become, eligible for indefinite leave to remain.

City Hall estimates, based on the 2021 Census, suggest that between 526,000 and 627,000 non-UK passport holders could meet the eligibility conditions. The same calculations put their annual economic contribution at around £50 billion to £61 billion. These are estimates of a potentially eligible population, not a count of care workers benefiting from the concession or a measure of the announcement’s economic effect.

The wider concern is staffing. A paper published earlier this year by the Greater London Authority’s Economics Team warned that fewer foreign workers could mean “a return to skills shortages”, with “significant implications for economic growth” in London and across the UK. It highlighted the potential consequences for delivery programmes in housing and social care.

City Hall’s assessment must now establish what the revised rules mean sector by sector, against that uncertainty about the numbers affected.