Kirsteen Sullivan
Main Page: Kirsteen Sullivan (Labour (Co-op) - Bathgate and Linlithgow)Department Debates - View all Kirsteen Sullivan's debates with the Home Office
(1 day, 9 hours ago)
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Kirsteen Sullivan (Bathgate and Linlithgow) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell.
Although 116 people in my constituency have signed the petitions, the story of one constituent—I will call her Jill—stuck with me. It is a story of anxiety and uncertainty for Jill, who works in social care on a health and social care visa. She described the reality that many face: low pay, unsafe workloads and a fear that speaking up about conditions at work could put her visa at risk. She made the point that those pressures have been pushing people to breaking point across the country for years. She captured exactly why this issue matters.
People like Jill moved here in good faith. They brought their families. They got jobs in health and social care roles, filling the critical gaps that we have in the workforce. They are contributing to society and dutifully paying their tax. Now the goalposts are potentially being moved. Will the Minister commit to protecting those already on the five-year route to indefinite leave to remain from retrospective changes? For workers like Jill, settlement is not just a petition or debate; it is whether they can plan a future in the country for which they are helping to care, whether they will have to uproot their families and leave the homes where they have created connections and communities, whether they can speak up about unsafe conditions without fear and whether their financial and emotional sacrifices will ever lead to the security they were promised.
Many on this route organised their lives around the existing five-year pathway.
Kirsteen Sullivan
In the interests of time, I will not.
Those people budgeted for visa fees, planned family life and made long-term decisions on the understanding that after five years they could apply for settlement. Extending that to 10 years means five more years of uncertainty and thousands of pounds in additional costs. For families, it means children growing up with prolonged insecurity and uncertainty. For workers, it means remaining tied to temporary status for a decade, severely limiting their bargaining power at work. For our public services, it risks driving away exactly the people we can least afford to lose.
I am not arguing that immigration policy can never change; I think most people here agree that it can and must change. However, there is a fundamental issue of fairness when changes are applied to people who are already here, already contributing to local and national economies and our public services and already well along a pathway that was clearly set out to them. We should not and must not pull the rug from under them now.