DAVID BARRETT: Labour’s time bomb of as much as 2.2million migrants set to win the correct to stay right here completely

A time bomb is ticking. It is a disaster that is economic and social in nature, but it is explosive nonetheless. And instead of working day and night to defuse it, Labour are bickering and dithering over which, if any, cable to cut.

As the Daily Mail reported yesterday, at least 200,000 migrants have now been granted ‘settled status’ since the Government first outlined proposals to tighten rules last autumn.

They will be able to stay in our country indefinitely, drawing on the full panoply of State benefits and being entitled to social housing.

Thousands every week are now making the UK their permanent home. Some are either ‘low wage’ or ‘no wage’, which is to say they will not benefit the Exchequer during their lifetimes but will instead be a serious net drag on public finances.

Those to have arrived since the pandemic alone could cost the British taxpayer some £10billion, according to the Home Office‘s own calculations – and at a time when the State is taxing everyone to the hilt and growth is sclerotic.

So what’s going on – and can anything be done to prevent this time bomb going off?

To answer that question, it’s worth outlining the current immigration rules.

Five years after first arriving in Britain, most legal migrants win the right to apply for ‘settlement’, also known as ‘indefinite leave to remain’ (ILR). This allows them to immediately start claiming welfare handouts, including universal credit and other benefits.

In theory, there is nothing to stop a migrant aged 25 or so securing ILR and then spending the rest of his or her life on the dole.

During the pandemic, migration to Britain – and everywhere else – inevitably plunged as people stopped travelling. But as the Covid virus receded, more than one million migrants came to Britain. The first among these are now securing ILR en masse – and, from next year, their numbers will accelerate still further and are projected to peak in 2028.

Last November, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood warned that it was essential to make these foreign nationals wait longer to secure ILR.

Under her proposals, the baseline qualification period would double to ten years. Low-skilled foreign workers – those performing roles requiring qualifications below a bachelor’s degree – could face a 15-year baseline, she said. Anyone claiming benefits for more than a year would suffer a ten-year penalty.

Her plans, therefore, meant that lower-skilled workers who made sustained claims for state handouts would be forced to wait up to 25 years to secure ILR. In contrast, high-earning foreign workers could accept an accelerated route: those paying the 45 per cent income tax rate would get seven years’ discount, for example.

To the man or woman in the street, this all seems perfectly reasonable: if you’ve contributed a lot in taxes, you are surely more deserving of the privilege of living permanently in Britain than someone who has paid in nothing or very little.

But such basic concepts of fairness are of course considered unthinkable by the welfare-obsessed Labour Party.

Following Andy Burnham’s leadership coup this summer and the party’s Leftwards march towards the imagined idyll of the 1970s, the Government’s determination to tackle this ILR booby-trap has all but evaporated.

Ms Mahmood’s original plan is essentially dead, and when she unveils a bowdlerised version in the coming weeks it’s likely to impose far fewer new restrictions on ILR and be far more generous to migrants who are already here.

And this represents an enormous economic problem because of the sheer mass of people involved. The number of affected migrants is around 1.6million – more than the population of Ms Mahmood’s home city of Birmingham. According to Home Office estimates, that is the ‘central estimate’ of the number who will obtain settlement between this year and 2030, but it could be as high as 2.2million.

Across all migrant categories, the number of ILR cases is likely to spiral upwards from 140,000 last year to peak at 449,000 in 2028.

Crucially, the totals include a massive spike in the number who arrived here on ‘health and care worker’ visas, introduced by the last Conservative government. Just 6,000 of those were eligible to apply for ILR last year, but by 2028 it is likely to be 210,000 – all on this one visa alone.

The Daily Mail has previously revealed how deeply flawed the care visa system was, with phony applications running rife and bogus agencies coining it in. Worse still, more than 10,000 who arrived under the care visa have gone on to claim ‘asylum’ here.

Independent think-tank Cambridge Circus Research has described the health and care worker visa as a ‘textbook policy failure’ which should ‘serve as a lesson’.

The Home Office had expected between just 6,000 and 40,000 applications a year, the report sets out, but in the 12 months to October 2023 there were more than 132,000 decided applications.

Bizarrely, new arrivals were initially entitled to bring their families, meaning that by 2025 nearly 295,000 visas had been issued to main applicants but a further 433,000 handed to their ‘dependants’. It’s worth stating that the health and care worker visa, and the wider relaxation of immigration restrictions, were the actions of a government trying to deal with the after-effects of a global pandemic, and which had been left with a £300billion bill after furlough schemes and other State largesse. It was also an attempt to address a genuine shortage of care workers.

Nonetheless, Rishi Sunak’s administration got the message, introducing a hurried series of visa restrictions which brought immigration levels down again.

However, the true implications of this record migration wave are now only just beginning to bite, thanks to the five-year lag on securing ILR.

Ms Mahmood’s proposals were designed to take the sting out of all this. But now, with Labour’s lunatics ascendant, she will almost certainly have to allow post-Covid migrants – some of whom arrived on those dodgy visas – to qualify for ILR much more quickly than she or the Treasury would prefer.

In all likelihood, the million-plus migrants who came in the post-Covid wave will very soon be eligible for ILR – and the taxpayer will be on the hook for the ruinous public expenditure this entails.

Ms Mahmood’s blue-tinged socialism is out of favour, with Angela Rayner, now Mr Burnham’s Housing and Communities Secretary, previously insisting from the backbenches that the proposed ILR reforms were ‘un-British’. Now Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh suggests they would ‘prolong the process of building cohesion’.

Yet it remains a fact that, in the Home Secretary’s own words, leaving ILR rules untouched will result in ‘a £10billion drain on our public finances’.

She added that it would be an ‘affront to the idea of fairness within our society, an affront to every family currently waiting for social housing, to those who have already spent too long on an NHS waiting list, and to British taxpayers who will inevitably foot the bill’.

Labour has never shown any real stomach to drastically reduce immigration – exemplified in the number of jobs going to foreign workers rather than British citizens – and it will surely offer no proper solution in the wake of its sharp and unmandated swerve to the Left.