Over the weekend I spent some time responding to the Home Office consultation (it closes in mid-February) on proposed changes to settlement and what it calls “earned residence”. Please engage with it. You might not agree with everything that follows but if any part of this unsettles you like it unsettled me then please share that with the government in the free text fields throughout.

I didn’t rush it. I did use ChatGPT though, not because I didn’t know what I thought, but because the free-text boxes are capped at 200 words, and I needed help saying the thing plainly, without my usual meandering. Whether you get to the end of this post or not probably determines whether you think I should be capped at 200 words more often.

Because, I’m afraid this is a long one. But it’s about something that more than likely will, in my eyes, come to define the 2024 Labour government and its oversight of our nation.

What unsettled me most wasn’t really any single proposal (many have been trailed since the new Home Secretary took up her position), but what the exercise has to say about the UK’s default setting – what we’re becoming comfortable with, what we stand for and believe in. What exactly are those “British values” some people are getting so angry about defending and proud about conveying with a flag?

Because this wasn’t a consultation that began by asking what it might mean for people to feel at home here. It didn’t start from the simple, obvious good news: that of all the countries in the world, some people choose this one to build their lives – to work, to raise children, to contribute, to belong. 

No, it began somewhere else entirely.

From the very start, settlement is framed less as recognition that the UK is going to gain because someone is making their life here, and more that our welcome must be earned through a sustained demonstration of worthiness.

Character: a decade long trial dressed up as suitability

It opens with character. Not character as formation, repair, or the slow work of becoming dependable. Character as a filter of suitability. Something you can fail; something that can add years; something that cannot be weighed against time, contribution, or changed behaviour.

And it’s worth naming the irony: character is something we are all either developing or degrading in ourselves. We’re all on a journey. We all have chapters we wish didn’t define us. So when the state chooses to make “character” into a decade-long review, it isn’t just shaping their behaviour — it is training ours. It is teaching us what we are allowed to believe about people, and how long we are allowed to withhold trust.

The test for me is quite simple: would I accept this logic if it were applied to someone I know and love, someone I’d invite to my Christmas dinner table? Not because they’re exceptional, but because they are ordinary. They’re capable of mistakes, misunderstandings, instability, bad seasons, and regret.

The system the government is imagining has little room for ordinary lives. Failure is sticky. Redemption is slow, if not forever out of reach. “Earned settlement” is less like a destination you’re looking forward to celebrating and more like the relief-filled end of a very long and exhausting trial.

This image isn’t neighbours and good friends, it’s guests and strangers. Allowed to stay but never invited to belong.

And that matters, not just morally, but socially. A society that keeps people permanently on the edge makes its own fabric brittle. If you never quite belong, how do you feel at home? And if you never feel at home, why would you invest in the place you live — emotionally, relationally, civically? The proposals fear a lack of integration, but aren’t they a recipe for exactly the detachment they claim to be preventing?

Andy and I tried to write our take on what it looks like to think Christianly about asylum under the phrase Welcoming Well. And our conclusion is that welcome is the gospel-shaped starting point; that our approach to asylum can be firm without being cruel; that borders can exist without contempt. That got written in the lead up to 2024’s general election where the previous government’s time in office had had many immigration related low points: Windrush, the hostile environment, distorted statements about migration in pursuit of Brexit, “citizens of nowhere”, the immigration health surcharge, and so on.

I had hoped a change of government might bring a change in moral imagination too. That we might step back from where we seemed to be heading. 

Those hopes have not been realised.

This consultation and its substance doesn’t contain any surprises from where the government has chosen to point its direction and for them it is suspicion, not welcome, that comes first.

A narrow safeguard, not a decade (or more)-long trial

My view is that we should begin from the opposite premise: that it is a good thing when people choose our country to settle their lives here. From that position, “character” is relevant but only as a narrow safeguard against serious harm, not a decade-long proving ground.

And to be clear: I don’t mean that only in the narrow case of someone with historic offences. I mean it as a description of the whole posture. Settlement should begin from a logic of belonging, with character as a bounded safeguard — not begin from suspicion, with belonging as a prize you might eventually be granted.

Serious criminal conduct and persistent non-compliance are relevant factors. But the whole point of time is that it lets you see what happens next: rehabilitation, sustained lawful behaviour, family life, and contribution over years – not only the worst moment, the messiest paperwork, or the most chaotic episode. If we remove our ability to weigh these things then we’ll get outcomes that are technically consistent with the rules but fundamentally unjust.

Even if you set aside that moral lens for a moment, the practical imagination here is astonishingly weak. An “earned settlement” regime at this level of granularity implies quite the apparatus of state scrutiny: evidence-gathering, data sharing, ongoing verification, discretionary judgement, appeals, cross-system reconciliation. It wants to create a permanent infrastructure of policing everyday life for those who, until ten years pass, are house guests not adopted family.

It assumes the state can reliably weigh “good” and “bad” indicators across ten years of a person’s life without bias, error, or arbitrariness. It assumes that this system won’t, in practice, be operated with increasing harshness and increasing harm in years to come — whether because of political pressure, targets, shifting rhetoric, or simply the drift that happens when suspicion is your starting point.

And then there’s the ordinary friction: it assumes people won’t be tripped up at the final hurdle not because they are dangerous, but because paperwork goes missing, lives get complicated, rules change, and the state is fallible.

And it raises a question: If someone has stayed for ten years, if they have built relationships, raised children, worked, worshipped, volunteered, cared, and endured what is the end game of withholding status at that point? To find reasons to refuse the people who have already demonstrated, simply by staying, that this is home? Or is it actually to make the route so onerous that fewer people begin it in the first place?

It is difficult not to conclude that this is less about governing well and more about signalling toughness. An attempt to make those who have hurled abuse outside asylum hotels or posted poisonous dehumanising messaging about migrants warm to this government. Except, at this point it seems the most obvious thing in the world that that’s a group of people who will never stop hating this government, no matter how much Labour tries to sound like it’s on their side. So we end up legitimising their frame, reaping no political dividend but driving away the people who want a humane, confident Britain. Isn’t that the kind of voter Labour should be desperate to keep? Isn’t an optimistic, progressive and expansive view of the future of Britain the reason people get into representative politics these days?

Integration: belonging turned into paperwork

The consultation then moved to “integration”, and at first the tone softened. Speaking English mattered. Community mattered. Participation was welcomed.

But it was all in pursuit of the same underlying pattern. 

Integration was not something to be enabled so much as something to be demonstrated. It required evidence. Documentation. References. Testimonies. Proof that could be monitored, validated, compared.

It’s hard not to see how easily this becomes performance. Those with time, confidence, networks, and social capital can present their integration legibly. Those navigating insecurity, care responsibilities, illness, or trauma cannot. Even the most sincere, ordinary forms of belonging – being the parent who shows up at school, the neighbour who helps carry shopping, the person who makes a workplace kinder – are not naturally “evidencable” in a way that a bureaucracy can measure.

And it’s worth asking: is there anything here that actually incentivises the kind of normal, everyday behaviour that is the hallmark of integration? Or does it incentivise test-taking, form-filling, and the production of a “legible” story?

There is also something faintly absurd about the cultural mismatch. The least British thing imaginable is making a ten-year fuss about your integration. Having to gather evidence that you went to the WI (or the mosque, or the food bank, or the school gates) is an almost perfect parody of the kind of bureaucratic performativity this country pretends to dislike.

Really, is there anything in what’s being proposed that sounds like we actually want people to feel at home?

Language as homecoming

At the first Welcoming Well conference we tried to sketch a “Framework for Feeling At Home”. To capture the ordinary ingredients we’d all look for if you or I were to travel thousands of miles and try to set up home in an alien context: stability, safety, familiarity, recognition. All the ways that mean you start living life to the full.

Language sits right in the middle of that and that’s why I love the work of Vineyard English School. People learn to express themselves fully when they feel safe enough to speak: not just to transact, but to joke, to argue, to tell stories, to pray, to name grief, to offer love. When they can express the poetry of their hearts in the language of their home.

But it was oddly joyless to see “advanced English” (C1) being proposed as a route to securing a one year reduction, a saving of ten per cent off the decade. As though English is a small optional extra rather than a central route into friendship, work, civic life, self-expression.

I don’t think the deeper question is about incentivising a test that you get to at the end. I think it’s whether we provide access to learning English from day one as an act of welcome. I’ve written before about how humbling it has been to spend time inside asylum accommodation helping people to add English to an already pretty well stacked list of linguistic accomplishments. C1 is a high bar to clear so maybe we should reward it but we should also invest seriously in accessible, high-quality provision for everyone.

Integration should be understood as participation, not performance. It’s about being able to live, work, relate, and contribute as part of everyday British life. It’s not about successfully navigating an expanding set of tests, proofs, and gatekeeping mechanisms. And language is such a core part of that.

I understand why the answer is mechanistic here – pass an exam, get a reduction is a simple equation. But if you’ve spent any time thinking about education you’ll know what that sort of system tends to create: test-passers, not life-livers. It generates compliance with the measurable, not real depth. And what communities need are life-livers: people who show up, care, stick around, build relationships, become the sort of neighbour who makes the street safer and kinder without ever putting it on a form.

And elsewhere in these proposals is an inevitable outcome of an evidential burden being created. Character references, community testimonies, and “credentials of belonging” will invite bias, they will advantage those with confidence and social capital, and they will add administrative complexity that will never, ever, be applied evenly.

A small number of bounded indicators, most usefully linked to the data and activity government already handles, would do the job without turning settlement into prolonged probation: English attainment (which may require support to achieve it), sustained work or study (which may require support to sustain it), and stable residence (which may require support to keep it stable).

Contribution: extraction without a safety net

The section on “contribution” made me frustrated about the way this consultation was designed. It narrows moral questions onto constrained scales and forced choices. I understand that you want to give people boundaries but when you’re wanting to disagree then the structure left little room to say why, or to surface the trade-offs that any serious system has to face. That’s the sort of consultation design that leaves you feeling like the exercise is designed to produce a defensible summary, not a genuine conversation.

Almost inevitably, the consultation frames contribution as fiscal: earnings, tax thresholds, continuous participation in the economy. Other forms of contribution have a degree of acknowledgment but care, volunteering, community life are secondary — which is strange, given how one view of integration implicitly depends on exactly those “soft” forms of participation. The government wants the signals of social belonging, while undervaluing the labour that actually sustains it.

That contradiction is underlined by two proposals in particular.

1. Fifteen years for essential work

The consultation suggests extending the qualifying period to 15 years for people who have worked in occupations below RQF level 6, in other words, work that doesn’t require a Bachelor’s Degree with honours.

This rests on a narrow and misleading view of value. Whole sectors of the economy operate below RQF6 and yet are essential to the functioning of our economy and our society: social care, hospitality, construction, food production, logistics, early years education. Treating the people who do this work as permanently provisional members of society undermines the very sectors the UK depends on.

There’s another flaw in this plan, and that’s how many people in the UK economy have degrees but work in roles that don’t require them. I discovered the other day that in Spain, 35% of people with degrees are doing jobs that don’t require them and Eurostat puts that figure for the UK (up to 2019) at around 25% (which is above average). Which would point to plenty of people with attainment of RQF level 6 being unable to qualify for this on the basis of the job that they do.  

A 15-year route doesn’t incentivise integration; it manufactures precarity. It creates a large class of long-term residents doing the jobs we rely on in the expectation of contribution while being denied stability and belonging. That’s a recipe for exploitation and poor integration outcomes.

2. Buying into belonging

Alongside this sits the opposite proposal: reducing time to settlement for those earning above £50,270. 

Income may reflect labour market demand but it is a poor proxy for integration, commitment, or the kind of neighbour you’re becoming. A system that accelerates belonging for the well-paid while deferring it for essential workers allows stability to be purchased, entrenching inequality in the very meaning of settlement.

I’m uneasy about accelerated routes in principle. But if reductions do exist they must include public service roles on national pay scales otherwise the state is structurally disadvantaging people doing vital work whose pay the state itself sets.

Penalising hardship and misunderstanding society

This is where the consultation put me in mind of a wider story that a strand of Labour voices are telling about “economic inactivity”. Labour MP Jonathan Brash, for instance, said he wanted zero economically inactive British workers (or as close to zero as possible), as though “inactive” were a policy target you can drive to zero without first acknowledging what the category actually means.

“Economically inactive” is a statistical label: people not in paid work who are not currently seeking work and/or not currently able to start. Which means it is care. It is chronic illness. It is study. It is grief and recovery. It is people holding families together. It is older people who have stepped back from formal employment and are now the spine of our voluntary sector. It is the quiet work of society that does not show up on payslips but without which the economy collapses.

When governments choose not to see that, they design policy as though coercion is the only tool they’ve got left. They start to treat complexity as non-compliance, and people’s needs as moral failure. And really that’s the shape of what’s being proposed here: a settlement system that will work for the easiest lives but which is punitive towards the messy reality of most nearly everyone else.

Periods of illness, unemployment, maternity, caring, study, or crisis are treated as liabilities rather than as normal features of human life. The government is saying that claiming support during these times should delay settlement – sometimes by years, sometimes by a decade.

Edited 16/01/26 to add the following five paragraphs. With thanks to Maisie for pointing out, quite rightly, that I had overlooked something really important. And not a minor detail but the sort of thing that can sit quietly in a document until it explodes people’s lives. Except, of course, for those it hits from day one. Which it will.

The Home Office isn’t just suggesting that periods outside paid work should delay settlement. It is proposing something more absolute: that unless you can evidence a minimum stretch of sustained earnings for 3 to 5 years then you may never settle at all.

And let’s make that real, outside of the abstract category of “the economically inactive”. That’s a spouse caring for a disabled partner. It’s a parent at home with small children. It’s doing the work to retrain or recertify because we don’t make it easy to recognise existing qualifications. Someone ill, someone older, someone supported, for a chunk of time, by a partner’s income. That is families doing what families do: absorbing shocks, covering gaps, keeping each other going.

And these proposals will apply retrospectively.

If you’ve chosen to make this country your home. If you’ve fallen in love and created a family. If that family houses children. Then the goalposts have moved and you’re looking at further extension to your ability to settle, and huge costs to do so. In the middle of a cost of living crisis and with all the rhetoric telling you that you’d don’t belong you’re being invited to pay for the privilege of being treated as second class for longer. The consultation asks if there should be transitional arrangements that respect those lives already lived and plans already made. A competent state, not just a compassionate one, would design policy from the ground up that protects and respects; it wouldn’t treat people’s lives like political theatre.

The underlying position is brutally clear: contribution first, safety later. The safety net becomes something you “earn” at the end, rather than something that helps you keep going along the way. And all the while living on the threshold, hoping that maybe you’ll be allowed through the door.

But societies do not function like this. Certainly not healthy ones.

Punishing public funds

The consultation then moves into even darker territory and asks about introducing penalties for claiming public funds: a “5 year penalty” for less than 12 months, and a “10 year penalty” for more than 12 months. That’s delaying your ability to settle on the basis that you have sought support from the government.

This is grossly disproportionate.

Public funds exist precisely because life happens: unemployment, illness, caring responsibilities, relationship breakdown, exploitation, housing shocks. Penalising lawful use of the safety net will predictably deter people from seeking support, push families towards destitution, increase informal work and exploitation, and create avoidable risks for children and public health.

If the Home Office accepts there are “extenuating circumstances”, that should not be an afterthought managed through exemption lists. The default should be that accessing support does not trigger a settlement penalty at all, especially where children are involved.

Later on the consultation returns to these thread but on something that most of us wouldn’t have thought twice about if asked. The question as to whether or people who have settled should be eligible to claim public funds. I had to read that question more than once – the premise here that at the point where the UK has said “please consider this your home” we are perpetuating a further form of second-class citizenship. How could this even be up for debate?

But for me the deeper and more enraging scandal is for the safety net to be withheld for many years from people who are already living here, working here, and raising families here. 

The contributions we make depend on our capacity to do so, that capacity is in no small part a reflection of our resilience, and our resilience depends on the support we turn to when we are in need. A system that withholds help until contribution is complete is not encouraging participation; it is extracting it.

A society that wants contribution has to be willing to support the conditions that make contribution possible.

One of the ways that the government is looking to measure contribution is in how it considers volunteering as a way to shorten routes to settlement. In principle, recognising “giving back” is welcome. But as many charities highlighted when responding to these proposals initially, volunteering should never become an expectation placed on those already contributing through paid work, care responsibilities, or simple survival. Formalising volunteering risks pressuring people into unpaid labour, advantaging those with time and social capital, and adding another layer of administrative judgement. It also removes the heart of volunteering – the voluntary, optional decision to spend your time supporting others.

And it is worth stopping to consider what is the kind of citizen that this sort of mentality trains us to imagine as our neighbour. This person who never falters, who never needs help, who never becomes inconvenient. Where the good that they do is in expectation of something in return, not as reflecting their generosity or compassion.

That’s not a human being. 

That’s a fantasy. Or a person falling apart silently under a legally created pressure to be flawless.

And fantasies make for cruel policy, because actual people inconveniently keep interrupting them with the messy reality of their lives and needs.

Residence: origin stories people can’t escape

When the consultation turned to residence, the focus shifted to how people arrived.

Irregular entry. Overstaying. Repurposing visas. Moments shaped by urgency, confusion, exploitation, and just simple necessity are being used as the definition of someone’s past, present and future. Penalties are being proposed not as temporary correctives, but as long shadows that will stretch years into the future and define who and what these people are.

There is little interest in who these people are or about how they have lived their lives. Whether they have regularised their status. Whether they have complied, worked, built relationships, raised children, put down roots. The Home Office is focused on beginnings not onward trajectories.

And two further realities sit behind the phrase “illegal” that the consultation skirts.

First, context: war, persecution, famine, climate breakdown, economic collapse, debt, trafficking, disease, state failure. When people move under those pressures, “choice” is an illusion, and survival looks an awful lot like non-compliance to those of us who have never had to improvise our way out of the comforts we take for granted.

Second, the stubborn refusal to make it meaningfully possible to seek asylum without being forced into “illegality” first. By all means, argue about borders and compliance but not until and unless there are credible routes for people to present themselves, be heard, wait, and be processed without resorting to a small boat. Otherwise the system manufactures irregularity and then punishes people for it.

Families: dismantled and undervalued

There is another undertone running through the consultation: the effective dismantling of family as a unit of belonging.

Partners and children are treated as independent economic actors, each earning settlement in their own right. We get age cut-offs, parallel pathways, and transitions onto adult routes.

Even where the consultation recognises that children cannot meet certain requirements, the response is not to anchor their status securely to family life but to invent new routes that risk leaving them exposed when they turn eighteen.

Children do not choose to migrate. They do not choose visa categories, income thresholds, compliance histories. A system that treats childhood as provisional, as something that must be justified later on, is a system that has lost its moral bearings.

It’s a system designed to tell children, at the most formative stage of life: you are not safe here; you are not fully welcome; you are condition. And it is hard not to ask: do we imagine children raised under that kind of fear and insecurity will grow into the kind of adults the Home Secretary wants to live in the UK?

Any settlement framework worth the name must be judged by how it treats children. On that measure, much of what is being proposed feels deeply unsafe.

Vulnerability: managed as exception, not designed for

Vulnerable groups get mentioned but as exceptions to the rule. Victims of abuse. Bereaved partners. People with care needs. Children who grew up without status. Refugees and resettled refugees. Each of these groups is being considered for special carve-outs and redrawn arrangements to be considered.

Of course it is right that such protections exist. But the cumulative effect is to show that designing for vulnerability is not the basis for designing the policies and services; it’s something reluctantly accommodated.

When government services start to depend on long exemption lists, it is often because public servants are trying to reduce harm within a system whose default is to cause it. And it trains everyone else to see vulnerability as a complication, rather than as the test of whether we are still a nation that knows how to care.

Politics: the Reform trap and Labour’s drifting moral leadership

We can’t pretend this is merely bureaucratically technical. This is a deliberate decision to propose a less compassionate and less humane approach compared to the government Labour replaced.

It leaves me particularly sad to reflect that we’re in a world where it is not really about who is in power, but what the centre of gravity has become.

After I left the OECD I didn’t expect to return to UK government work. Not because I couldn’t comply with the civil service code but because the way it treated the most vulnerable made participation feel morally corrosive. Since the election I’ve softened that stance, working with DWP and NHSE, in the hope that a change of government would restore seriousness about compassion, dignity, and restraint. But this consultation and these policies put me right back in the quandary I was two years ago.

It’s not that it’s louder or cruder. But it is thinner and more technocratic. It’s more confident that harm can be justified if it is spreadsheeted carefully enough. It seems less troubled by the moral cost of policies that fragment families, extend insecurity for children, and treat hardship as failure.

As someone whose career has been shaped by a belief that public service can be an expression of care – that government can be a place where love of neighbour is institutionalised rather than privatised – this is disorienting. It is hard to know where to stand when the party that stands on the moral inheritance of solidarity and protection is willing to instantiate cruelty.

And there is a political mistake here too, almost painful in its predictability: Labour is borrowing Reform’s posture to win Reform voters back. But it won’t work. Instead it adds fuel to their fires while driving away people who believe the rule of law and humane government belong together.

I should be persuadable. Instead, with one eye on the forthcoming Mayoral election in Croydon, I am in a bind. Supporting local candidates inevitably communicates something to party leadership about endorsing a national posture that feels smaller, harsher, and less confident than the country I believe we are (and wish to be). I don’t think I am the only one.

Discipleship: why the questions matter as much as the answers

If you have spent time with Jesus. If your imagination has been shaped by the Kingdom He announces. Then you can’t move through a consultation like this neutrally. You cannot read these questions without noticing which way the weight falls. You cannot answer them without feeling them actively pulling you away from mercy, restoration, compassion, welcome.

A life formed by the Kingdom does not struggle with the answers so much as with the questions. The Kingdom trains you to expect that people can change, that the poor are not a problem to be managed, that children are not collateral, that care precedes contribution, that belonging heals.

The consultation adopts the opposite stance: suspicion before trust, extraction before support, probation before homecoming.

This is where my connection to the idea of kingdœmocracy becomes more than an abstract framework. It locates me in the tension between the kingdoms we build and the Kingdom we are called to witness to. It reminds me that politics is not just about outcomes, but about formation – what we are being trained to accept as normal, reasonable, inevitable.

So my prayer is not that the Church becomes louder, or more partisan, or more certain. It is that the Body becomes more reliable in signposting what heaven on earth might mean when we engage on these topics.

That our salt still tastes like something (Matthew 5:13). 

That our light still helps people see (Matthew 5:14-16). 

That, when asked to provide our input to a set of questions that paint a picture of a smaller, harsher vision of human life, we quietly refuse, and in doing so, help our common life remember another way.

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This wasn’t a consultation that asked me what kind of immigration system I want.

It was a consultation that reveals something worrying about the kind of country we are willing to imagine.

One in which settlement is probation.

In which contribution precedes care.

In which children grow up provisionally.

In which vulnerability is an inconvenience.

In which welcome is something you earn late, if at all.

This is not an argument for open borders, nor a rejection of standards. It is a question about starting points.

What if settlement marked the moment the state acknowledges that someone’s future lies here – rather than the end of a long moral trial?

What if we wrote policy as though strangers might one day become neighbours, and neighbours something like family?

Policy shapes outcomes. But it also shapes instincts. It teaches us what to accept. 

And this consultation left me wondering what we are learning to tolerate, and who we are becoming as a result.

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If you found this piece helpful or valuable then please share so it reaches further but more importantly, please engage with the consultation itself while it’s still open.

You don’t have to agree with me. But I think these questions are too consequential not to engage with for all of us.