‘Fundamentally unfair’: Burnham must overhaul migration reforms, says TUC general secretary

Speaking ahead of the TUC’s annual congress in Brighton next week, Nowak welcomed the “sense of optimism” around Burnham’s fledgling government, but he urged the PM to act in a series of areas, including migration and the cost of living. Burnham reappointed Mahmood as home secretary when he became prime minister in July. Her department is consulting on proposals that would force more than 300,000 low-paid workers to wait 15 years for the legal right to remain in the UK. These include many carers who came to the UK to fill vacancies after the Covid pandemic, and were told they could apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years. “I think it is fundamentally unfair to change the rules when people came to this country with one set of expectations,” Nowak said. “I hope we can think again on that.” He added: “There are 111,000 staff vacancies in social care at the moment. I want us to train up as many Brits as possible to do those jobs. But 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.” As well as criticising the backward-looking changes, Nowak also condemned the idea of applying a 10- or 15-year wait to many new arrivals, as the Home Office has proposed. “Both my granddads came to this country after the second world war – one came from Hong Kong, one came from Poland. Both raised their families 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 … how the hell do you plan? Can you buy a house? What does that mean for your employment? Do you send them to school? I mean, it cuts across any effort to integrate at all.” Labour politicians supportive of the changes see them partly as a way of assuaging public concerns about migration, and neutralising the appeal of populist parties, including Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. But Nowak suggested that , the approach could ultimately fuel far-right sentiment. “I tell you where you end up: you end up with Reform claiming that a woman who was born in Somalia and has lived here for most of her life and worked hard and contributed to our society, somehow isn’t fit to hold elected office in this country.” Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, was recently accused of “straightforward racism” ’s frontrunner to replace Keir Starmer in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, former child refugee Sagal Abdi-Wali, was not British.