PCS joins calls to scrap new immigration plans

As the Home Affairs Select Committee has warned, the government's proposals risk harming integration, increasing exploitation, destabilising key sectors such as social care, and causing long-term insecurity for children and families.

The plans could have a devastating impact on PCS members and their families, particularly as many will not meet the income threshold requirements. We have already seen members being deported because of changes to worker visa rule requirements.

In November 2025, the Home Office announced plans to replace the current pathway to settlement with a so-called 'earned settlement model', which doubles the baseline qualifying period (which can be increased or reduced according to fixed criteria) to 10 years, more than any other major economy. It also misrepresents the current cost and qualifying period to settle in the UK, which is among the highest in the world already and therefore unquestionably earned.

Last week, PCS joined a roundtable of campaigners in parliament to call on the government to scrap the plans.

The meeting was called by Reunite Families UK who wanted to raise awareness with parliamentarians about the issue. Speakers including legal professionals, economists and unions representing health and social care and higher education workers, explained how the earned settlement changes could have significant impacts on key workers, on migrants in low paid work, on families whose members end up on different routes to settlement, on partners of British citizens who don’t meet the proposed income requirement to settle, and on the UK's competitiveness as a global employer.

Offering practical solutions

PCS has accused the government of trying to oversimplify the issues of immigration through the prism of stopping small boat crossings, which only accounts for 2 per cent of migration to the UK. The union has put forward practical solutions that address the problem at the source like the ones we have put forward with Care4Calais in our Safe and Secure Routes for Refugees report.

Speaking on behalf of PCS, the PCS Home Office group president Karen Alderson told a packed room of parliamentarians:

“Our trade union has helped present well-researched proposals to reform our immigration asylum system to ensure asylum seeker applications are considered quickly, reducing expenditure significantly on things like hotels, and enabling those who are granted refugee status to earn settled status by contributing.”

Research by the London School of Economics, commissioned by PCS and Together With Refugees, shows how we can be both compassionate to refugees and prosperous as a nation.

The Welcoming Growth: The Economic Case for a Fair and Humane Asylum System report sets out the economic benefits of:

• Reducing asylum application processing to six months,
• Providing legal assistance at all stages of the application process
• English language support from day of arrival
• Employment support from day of arrival.

The benefits of these four policy changes include a £266,000 boost to the UK economy for every refugee, a net benefit to the public purse of £53,000 for every refugee.

By expediating the asylum application processing to six months and providing legal assistance, asylum system-related costs would be reduced by 40%.Karen said: “This is what practical solutions look like when people who work in the system put forward ideas, instead of politicians who only present changes to appease anti-immigrant rhetoric.”