Mahmood has argued reforms are required to avoid a “drain on our public finances”.
In her foreword to the consultation, Mahmood said the bar to entry to the UK was “lowered significantly” and this was “most evident in the health and care visa”.
She wrote: “An attempt to fill between 6,000 and 40,000 jobs saw the arrival of 616,000 individuals from 2022 to 2024.
“Over half were not even arriving to work in that sector but were instead dependants of those who were.”
Home Office calculations suggested 196,000 care workers and their adult dependants could settle between 2026 and 2030, at an estimated lifetime cost of £9.5bn to taxpayers.
On Monday, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank said that skilled workers and their dependants due to settle in the UK under current rules are expected to make a net lifetime contribution of around £115bn through the taxes they pay.
Former Home Office Minister Mike Tapp told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I very much hope that those who are genuinely working in health and social care for five years are exempt from that retrospective extension to the time they need to be here before they apply for settlement.
“We’ve all known someone in our family or friends who has been cared for by these people, so that would be the right thing to do.”
In June, Mahmood had asked Sir Keir to sack Tapp after he wrote an unauthorised article arguing that foreign care workers should be exempt from the changes to ILR.
Dr Ben Brindle, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, said that “at the broader level [the policy] probably won’t have too much impact” on people’s decision to come to the UK.
“Immigration policy acts as more of a barrier than anything,” he told Today.
Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp said: “By Mahmood’s own admission in a speech this March, letting low wage care workers alone stay forever will cost taxpayers £10bn and be an ‘affront’.
“Now she looks likes she’s about to do exactly that.”
Meanwhile, Reform UK home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf said Mahmood had been “overruled” by Burnham, which was “a disaster for Britain”. He added that Reform would abolish ILR altogether.
