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.
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