Proposed ILR Rules – The Unfair Impact on Working Mothers and the Need for a Full Maternity Exemption

[Zinary]

I am writing this with a newborn in my arms, and my heart is completely breaking.
Instead of being allowed to heal, rest, and soak in the pure joy of my baby, I am sitting here crying, terrified, and questioning if I made the right choice to have a child. How can a mother be driven to question her greatest gift, her absolute world, all because of a cruel change to immigration law?
On 2 November, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the finalized "Earned Settlement" rules. To get Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) in the standard 5 years, you now must earn over £50,271 a year.
But the absolute malice is in the fine print: you must meet that £50,271 threshold in three out of the last five years before you apply.
The Home Office is actively spinning this "3 out of 5 years" rule as a generous maternity "buffer." They are telling the public it gives women two years of leeway to have a baby.
Let me tell you why that math is a blatant, calculated lie for real women:

1. The Starting Trap: Many of us spent our first two years in the UK working up from entry-level salaries, earning below that £50k mark. Our two "buffer years" are ALREADY GONE. We have zero margin for error left.
2. The Maternity Penalty: Pregnancy is nine months of physical toll, followed by maternity leave and statutory pay dips. If your annual P60 earnings drop below £50,271 because you lose out on bonuses, commission, or overtime while caring for your baby, your year doesn't count. The clock resets.
3. The Multi-Child Ban: If you want to have two children within five years, it is mathematically impossible to hit that threshold for three consecutive years.

If the math fails you because you chose to have a baby, you are forced onto the 10-year path. The punishment? Paying thousands of pounds more in upfront Immigration Health Surcharges (IHS) and visa extensions just to keep your home. For a family, we are talking about an extra £35,000+ extracted by the Home Office. This is evil. It is a pay-to-settle hierarchy that penalizes the female body and treats human lives like a spreadsheet. The right to live and build a family must NEVER be a hard choice. The Home Office is laying these rules before Parliament next month (December) to take effect in 2027. We have a tiny, critical window to fight this. I am calling on every mother, every ally, and anyone who believes that a woman shouldn't be penalized for having a child to help us.

• If you are an immigration lawyer: How do we launch a class-action challenge against this under the Equality Act?
• If you have links to journalists or MPs: Please help us get this cruel math into the mainstream media. Backbench Labour MPs forced a U-turn on care workers last week—we can force a U-turn on mothers if we make enough noise.
• If you are a British citizen: Will you write to your MP on behalf of your migrant friends and colleagues who have no voice in the ballot box?

Please bump this, share this, and tell me what we can do. I refuse to let a spreadsheet dictate whether it was a "mistake" to hold my beautiful baby.

You seem to think that if the child is born to 2 migrants we'd think it had or should have less rights?

I'm not saying that a child born to.immigrants whether one to 2 should be Ny diffyto a child born to British parents. I'm saying shifting goalposts happen all the time, people lost jobs, they struggle with inflexibility, there is constant inequality around maternity and all of that information people's choices to have children and when.

I just don't see how this issue is any different or is any more 'stopping me from having children when I want to have them' than all the financial, organisational and personal reasons other people have to make those decisions

Where is OP demanding more benefits than the British get? She's simply complaining, with reason, that the goalposts have been shifted.

If this change is to come in, I think it needs to apply to new entrants only, not those already here.

A brit can have a child now? Have you seen the cost of living? My husband's just been made redundant, my eldest has significant additional needs, I can assure you even if I wanted to have a kid right now I couldn't because of all the wider considerationa. Why re your wider considerations more important or valid?

Ultimately while I see this is frustrating for you it sounds like you could mitigate the impacts by some combination of shortening your maternity leave overall or sharing with your husband/partner.
I don’t think the rules are inherently unreasonable. What I do think is that if someone enters the country in Year one on a set of rules, meets the criteria and is working towards ILR it’s unreasonable to change the rules for that person in Y2 or Y3. The maternity bit specifically I think there is no easy way to legislate for and you just have to work around it with your personal circumstances.
What paid leave do you get? Can you take just that and go back early then plan to take a longer leave at some point in the future when you have ILR (maybe a sabbatical or maybe working part time?)

We have limited resources within the UK to support the NHS and benefits. The system is as many of us experience on a daily basis, is stretched and often delivers badly for people who have lived here all their lives.

I understand that it is frustrating that the rules have changed, but in honesty we need to focus on UK citizens and long term residents. Your game plan takes much more out the system than it gives and someone has to pay for this.

I'll bite. I have ILR, and yes it was a lot cheaper and easier than when I applied over a decade ago. I get OP's frustration because the new law punishes hard working immigrants like her. While those who do abuse the system, the kind who bred like rabbits and never have intention to work, they are here already, on ILR and definitely got their citizenship already.

It's a complex problem where some people from certain countries, have been abusing the system for years and the minority who want to contribute get punished because there is not enough money to sustain everyone now.

OP, if I were you, I'd either do what I need to do on the ten year pathway or reconsider if you really want to live in the UK. I know foreigners who are rich with family assets and highly educated who are leaving or considering to leave in droves. I am considering myself even though I'm a high rate tax payer now just due to how unfriendly UK is today and retiring here is just dire.

Ive looked into this further too, you can still combine incomes to reach the wage threshold for certain visas, if you are on a skilled worker visa, surely its obvious that it wouldn't and you would have to reach the minimum wage criteria yourself to receive ILR. @Zinary , what visa are you on? I also waited until I had ILR to have a baby, because that seemed the most responsible decision to make. Im not sure I could be as outraged as you are given the current political climate without guaranteeing my own permanent immigration status in the country raising my children

Of course not. But if the argument is that immigrants should be net contributors rather than recipients then does that change if parent B is British?

Are all British citizens expected to be net contributors? No.

Genuine question - if the current situation irks you so much, why couldn’t you and your husband return to your home country, have as many children as you want, then return to UK as economic migrants in a few years?

What are the rules for immigration in the country you left OP?

When you have paid into a broken system in your home country for years and years, not got the help you need, medical etc because our NHS is so underfunded and badly managed, 10K seems like nothing, sorry.
A country that takes low earners is a country deeply broken, and a child is not a right it's a choice.

Genuine question: why does limiting immigration to higher earners benefit the people already here? I understand they will pay income tax but doesn’t this just limit the career prospects/social mobility of people born in the UK? As you end up with a sort of international elite of the best educated and most privileged able to move wherever they fancy, increasing competition for people born here and likely keeping them in lower paid/lower status jobs (unless they are already very privileged and therefore able to compete with these high skilled immigrants)?

I don’t think a salary of around £50k is particularly elite, it’s a mid-career teaching or social work salary and reflects someone who is probably working full time in an established career. It benefits people already here because they aren’t filling in a gap left by lower earners. Around £50k is the point at which, from a purely economic point of view, people make a net contribution through tax and NI depending on household. We need people paying in at least as much as they use, it’s not unfair to say to people wanting to make the uk their home that they need to make a net economic contribution.

Thankfully, this view is losing credibility with every month that passes.

Yes, there is a very noisy minority that shouts it out, giving the impression that a lot of people hold it but, thankfully-as reality sets in-a fair number of people disagree.

In the recent past, it was easy to shut those people down with shouts of racism but, as is often the case when something is overused, it has worn thin.

The OP , living in the past, thought her post would bring forth cries of outrage on her behalf and, not so long ago, it would have done.

Today, almost 90% of those who have voted do not support her and a fair number of those have expressed outrage at her sheer chutzpah!

Unfortunately, the rhetoric in your post just feeds into anti-immigration sentiment. You sound entitled and as if you expect Britain, the Government and the taxpayer to be bending according to your wishes so that you can have everything you want right now and for free. You might think I'm anti-immigration, but I'm absolutely not. I'm very much in favour. But language is important and posts like this don't help your own cause.

But op is being forced to be a net contributor to have a baby.

She needs to be a net contributor to immigrate

She wants a baby

She decides how to manage the timeline of those 2 things.

I didn't have to be a net contributor to have a baby but in order to afford childcare and continue to working the career I worked my backside off for both my husband and I needed a certain I come level and job security. So we waited until we had those before having children.

Immigrate and work your family planning around that and build your career and work your family planning around that are not terribly different

Because typically the roles that higher earners occupy we have a skills shortage of. Lower paid migrants tend to be lower skilled (and also in need of more state support).

I can understand the case for unskilled migration when we are at almost full employment. It makes less sense to have lots of young Britons on unemployment and then lots of unskilled people coming in to do their labour. Also the higher earning migrants do not create the same depression of wages as we see at the lower end of the scale.

It’s also stops people whining about immigrants costing and not contributing.

I'm sorry you are getting such unsympathetic replies, op.
I hear you
You, hopefully will contribute to our society for many years to come, meanwhile the others who are a persistant drain on our system, the work-shy, the "illegals" will continue to get "freebies" whilst contributing nothing.
I hear you x

OP , the UK has become hostile to immigrants for no just cause, YNBU at all. These new laws are almost punitive to say the least. Immigrants are not the problem: cue Brexit, Covid, clueless government legislations!

Whilst I see the OP's plight, and I am sympathetic, I agree with @iamnotalemon. I'm British, DH is not. I have lived in several other countries with him as part of his job. My DD was born abroad - we had to pay for it privately as we were not entitled to use the healthcare that was available in that country at the time. We have always paid for private / international schools for DD in the countries we lived in, as she was not entitled to free education. We all have to abide by the rules of the countries we choose to live in. Some of those rules are deeply unfair, and thus we make a decision as to whether it is worthwhile for us (financially and personally) to stay. There are pros and cons to everything. I should add that as a British foreigner I was only entitled to three months maternity leave when DD was born abroad, and as such I was back at work six weeks after she was born. It was tough, but we all survived. OP, it's open to you to shorten your maternity leave if you want another child. We all make choices in this life, and they are not always easy.

Agreed, we are a densely populated country. All our services are under strain. Housing costs are sky high. We have over a million NEETs. Our countryside and wildlife are massively depleted. So the tide is turning in terms of bringing large numbers of people into the country.

But I thought Mahmood had rowed back on extending the time period to be able to get ILR because she can't get it through the left wing of the Labour Party who are now in the ascendancy. I hope it does get toughened up because it needs to.

I think there is a debate to be had about immigration.

I don’t think there is any debate at somebody whining that they their family planning maybe hindered by life choices (such as migrating and wanting ILR.

EVERYBODY has to factor in broader life situations when deciding whether, when and how many children to have. I have no idea why OP wants special treatment in that regard.

It’s not even that big an impact. She simply has to wait a little longer to qualify for ILR.

Agreed. I am probably one of the most laissez-faire when it comes to regular and irregular forms of migration. I have also been a migrant and have a migrant background

Posts like OPs make me have sympathy for Restore.

This only applies if you are here on a work visa, not married to a British citizen. You literally came here to work.

Agree with others this is an overly emotional and hyperbolic post - if you were so concerned about your immigration status and being able to hold your child you could have done so in your own country? I get this is nuanced and complex but immigration rules and law is - and I say that as a migrant myself.

I don't know where you came from originally, but if having children is the most important thing to you could you just go back there. Unfortunately to get the right to remain there are rules. I think you may be able to get another 5 year visa if you choose to stay and try again. If you are a care worker the earning limit is £25k. And some other occupations don't have an earnings limit I believe.

Yes, we have an aging population. Maybe we could look to supporting our young people into the workforce. Having a million NEETS is a disaster.

But no, the open borders lobby would much rather we left those young people on the dole and brought in hundreds of thousands of people from abroad.