I had the Home Secretary's settlement statement open on one screen and a client's pay review spreadsheet on the other when the two started talking to each other.
On 2nd November Shabana Mahmood confirmed the final shape of what the Home Office calls earned settlement. For most migrants on a sponsored route, the wait for indefinite leave to remain is now ten years instead of five, as Personnel Today's employer guide sets out. Plenty of people in manufacturing HR offices will have read that on Monday and moved on, because it sounded like somebody else's problem.
Most of the noise has been about care workers, who keep a five-year route if they arrived before May 2025 and earn at least £25,000. Some public sector health and education staff keep it too.
What do the new settlement rules actually say?
The default route is now ten years. Earn at least £50,271 and it drops to five, and earn at least £125,141 and it drops to three. Those figures come from Ross Kennedy, a senior client manager at Vanessa Ganguin Immigration Law, who wrote the guide. And he has read the small print far more carefully than I have.
New Immigration Rules are expected in December, with the changes taking effect next year. Until then the current rules apply, and there are no general transitional arrangements.
Earnings are judged on a best-years basis, meaning three of the last four years for the three-year route, three of five for the five-year route and five of seven for the ten-year one.
Why does one pay figure matter so much to a manufacturer?
Because it now decides how long you carry the sponsorship. A manager paid just under £50,271 stays on the long route, which means more years of visa extensions, more fees and a longer obligation on you as the sponsor. Someone paid above it reaches settlement sooner, and your commitment to them ends sooner too.
For a family of four on a further five-year application, Kennedy's guide puts the extra cost at up to £32,170, before legal fees and before any rise in visa fees.
I won't pretend to know what every pay band in your plant looks like. But a pay review used to ask whether a manager was worth the money, and now it also asks what that money does to their immigration route. That's a strange question to carry into a meeting you thought was about budgets.
Anyone who typed “engineering manager salary UK” into a search bar last month was after a market benchmark. The benchmark still matters, and our salary guides are a fair place to start, but it has a second job now.
It's a new line item for the pay review.
Will experienced managers from overseas still choose the UK?
Some will be deterred, according to the law firms and business groups reacting, but nobody can say how many yet. What we have so far is the reaction, and it's loud. Arbor Law points to the cost and disruption of losing experienced staff you've already recruited, sponsored and trained, and says smaller firms will feel it most.
The CBI says the care worker exemption weakens the case for the rest of the policy.
Spencer West LLP is worried about skilled workers earning under £50,271 who assumed they'd settle after five years. Edwin Coe points out that the rules apply retrospectively, so some people a year or two from settling could now be six or seven years away. But the government went ahead anyway after a consultation that drew over 205,000 responses.
Personnel Today reports that 84% of individuals and 79% of organisations who responded disagreed with the proposals.
The managers I'd think about first are the ones already partway along a five-year route. Someone who expected to settle soon and now sees a much longer road will quite reasonably start asking what else is out there. And their employer, who has spent years training them into the plant's way of working, is the one left with the gap.
Law experts quoted in the same publication also point to a risk that overseas workers choose not to come at all, which would make shortage roles harder to fill. For a mid-senior role that's already slow to fill, that's the bit that worries me.
A plant manager weighing up a move can do the sums on ten years as easily as anyone.
Can you just stop considering candidates who need a visa?
Not safely. Kennedy's guide warns that a blanket refusal to consider candidates who need visas may amount to indirect race discrimination, and it points to the case of Osborne Clarke Services v Purohit. It adds that asking only migrant staff about spent convictions could be direct nationality discrimination.
So take employment law advice alongside the immigration advice, because we're recruiters and not solicitors. Your immigration adviser and your employment lawyer may well need to talk to each other before anything goes in writing.
What is worth checking before the new rules land?
Start with a list, which sounds dull and is usually the bit that gets skipped. Who do you sponsor, and when did they start? Which side of the £50,271 line do they sit on, and does anyone know? Some longer-serving Skilled Worker staff on older salary thresholds keep a protection, according to the guide, so ask your immigration adviser who qualifies.
Then look at the pay conversation. If someone sits a few hundred pounds under the line, ask whether that was a decision or an accident.
And if you're about to make an offer to someone who needs sponsoring, cost the whole route and not just the first visa. Ten years of sponsorship is a different business case from five, and sponsorship is a long relationship now, so it's worth treating it like one.
On that second screen the spreadsheet looked exactly as it had an hour earlier. Same names, same bands, same cells. The only thing that had changed was what one of those numbers meant. I sat there a while longer than I'd planned to.
If you've a sponsored manager on your books, or a role you can't fill without one, our engineering recruitment team is happy to look at the role with you and say plainly what the market looks like for it.
