TUC chief warns Burnham's migration reforms risk social care crisis and far-right surge

Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, arrived at a stark warning this week: the government's migration reforms risk creating the very conditions they are meant to prevent. Speaking ahead of the TUC's annual congress in Brighton, Nowak said Prime Minister Andy Burnham must reconsider the overhaul of immigration rules that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has been consulting on—rules that would force more than 300,000 low-paid workers to wait 15 years before they gain the legal right to remain in the UK.

Many of these workers are carers who came to Britain to fill vacancies left by the pandemic. They were promised something different when they arrived: the chance to apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years. Now that promise is being rewritten. "I think it is fundamentally unfair to change the rules when people came to this country with one set of expectations," Nowak said. The policy reversal cuts to the heart of a deeper tension within Labour's approach to migration—the attempt to tighten rules in order to neutralize public anxiety and, by extension, to blunt the appeal of populist parties like Nigel Farage's Reform UK.

But Nowak argued the strategy will backfire. By extending the period before people can consider themselves settled, the government is not reducing far-right sentiment; it is feeding it. He drew on his own family history to illustrate the point. Both his grandfathers came to Britain after the Second World War—one from Hong Kong, one from Poland—and both built lives here. "The idea that you could be here for the next 10, 15 years and you'd still have no legal right to remain in the country," he said. "How the hell do you plan? Can you buy a house? What does that mean for your employment? Do you have kids? Do you send them to school? I mean, it cuts across any effort to integrate at all."

The social care sector adds another dimension to the problem. There are currently 111,000 staff vacancies in social care. Nowak said he wants Britain to train more of its own citizens for these roles, but he was blunt about the arithmetic: "I suspect in a growing economy with an ageing population, we are still going to need people to come and live and work in the UK and work in sectors like social care." A policy that makes it harder for migrant workers to settle, to plan their futures, and to feel secure in their status is not a solution to workforce shortages. It is an obstacle to solving them.

Nowak went further, drawing a line from the rhetoric of Farage and his allies to what he called the "proto-fascism" of the balaclava-clad vigilantes who blocked infrastructure in Dover and tried to stop migrants arriving in Portsmouth the previous weekend. He suggested that Reform's appeal may already be waning—union members who voted for the party in recent local elections are, he said, becoming less enthusiastic the more they see of Farage. But the government's own migration policy, he warned, could reverse that trend by creating a permanent underclass of people with no legal status, no security, and no stake in society.

Instead, Nowak urged Burnham to focus on the issues that actually drive populist sentiment: the cost of living. Ahead of the October budget, he called for a "social tariff" to cut energy bills for lower-income households, funded by a windfall tax on banks. "The public bailed the banks out in 2008," he said. "For those families who are worried about turning on the heating this year, asking the banks to pay their fair share isn't unreasonable." The logic was clear: if the government delivers on the material concerns that matter to voters, it will undercut the appeal of right-wing populism far more effectively than tightening migration rules ever could.

A Home Office spokesperson responded by restating the government's position. The reforms, announced last November, would double the standard qualifying period for settlement to 10 years for most migrants, with shorter routes for those deemed to contribute most to the UK. A consultation on elements of those reforms has closed, and the government said it would set out its response in due course. The tension between Nowak's warning and the government's stated intent remains unresolved—a test of whether Burnham's administration will reconsider its approach or press ahead with a policy that its critics say will solve nothing while creating new problems.