On Monday, home secretary Shabana Mahmood announced perhaps the most significant u-turn under Andy Burnham’s nascent premiership yet. In an appalling act of appeasement towards the most radical aspects of the Labour Party, Mahmood reversed her proposed reforms to indefinite leave to remain (ILR) status for migrants.

Mahmood has spent the past year attempting to portray herself as a tough-on-borders politician, willing to make an enemy of herself by taking the decisions others were too afraid to. A cornerstone of her tough approach was to make the hundreds of thousands of care workers and their dependents who arrived between 2021 and 2024 – known as the Boriswave – wait 15 years rather than five before claiming ILR, a permanent-residency status that would make them eligible for welfare benefits. Burnham, when he campaigned for the Leave-voting seat of Makerfield in June, gave his full-throated support for Mahmood’s reforms.

Now, after intense opposition from the open-borders Labour Party – led by frontbenchers Angela Rayner and Miatta Fahnbulleh – even these minor reforms have been abandoned. In the new proposals outlined on Monday, foreign-national care workers who earn at least £25,000 per year and meet the rest of their visa conditions will be able to settle permanently in Britain, along with their dependants, after only five years. At which point, of course, they will be able to avail themselves of the UK’s incredibly generous welfare system.

The consequences of Mahmood’s backdown will be disastrous. According to the Home Office, foreign care workers are estimated to have a net lifetime cost to the taxpayer of £36,000 each. Each adult dependent brought by these care workers is estimated to have a cost to the taxpayer of £67,000 over their lifetime. Based on the assumption that there would have been 117,000 care workers and 79,000 adult dependants estimated to settle in Britain between now and 2030, the Home Office approximated the total cost to the taxpayer at around £9.5 billion.

Yet the revised figures paint an even bleaker picture. In response to a consultation on the proposed changes to the rules, the government revealed that the number of care workers and dependants arriving in Britain could actually be significantly higher: 146,000 care workers and 136,000 dependants. This could put the total estimated cost at closer to £14.5 billion.

None of this is news to Mahmood. In March, she said that the cost of these care-worker visas would mean ‘ever longer waits for the 1.3million people in this country on the social-housing list… and yet more pressure placed upon our National Health Service’. She said that failing to reform ILR would be ‘an affront to the idea of fairness within our migration system’. She was correct. Yet, less than a year on, she has wilfully decided to ignore her own argument.

The consultation itself, which informed the government’s decision-making, can only be described as a joke. It received 204,667 responses, 73 per cent of which came from current visa holders. Only 18 per cent of respondents were British citizens. So the government’s policy on ILR appears to have been dictated by the very individuals who would seek to benefit from relaxed immigration rules.

Mahmood’s u-turn won’t only have dire economic consequences. The care worker visa itself is disastrously flawed and open to abuse. Again, this is a fact Mahmood herself is clearly aware of, having stated earlier this year that fraud is ‘rife’ within the sector, with ‘phoney care providers created to draw people to this country on a false promise of work’. Some British care firms have charged African aspiring care workers thousands of pounds more than their visas actually cost, while the Home Office has previously been scammed into awarding hundreds of care worker visa sponsorships to individuals without the related care homes having any knowledge of it.

The truth is that many Britons have transferred their admiration and respect for NHS workers on to all those who work in care services. While many care workers are clearly very good at their jobs, this is not the case for all of them. English-language skills among foreign care workers are notoriously poor. A 2023 Home Office investigation into migrant care workers found that there were many concerns about forged documents and poor language skills. The report noted that the language published on government websites regarding care-worker visas was aimed at those with a reading age of nine.

The volte-face undertaken by Mahmood on Monday was an appalling act of cowardice. She is aware of the problems with the system, having expounded on many of them earlier in the year. But she has decided that her own principles are less important than the applause she may receive from some Labour Party colleagues. It is a shameful act to change one’s mind so abruptly, so quickly, with zero evidence to support her apparent newfound conviction.

If Shabana Mahmood had any semblance of honour, she would have resigned rather than put forward such a policy. Sadly, it seems that nothing is beneath her. When scandals arise in the fallout of this decision, as they no doubt will, we must remember exactly who to hold accountable.

Adam James Pollock is a writer.