Home Office to scrap Long Residence route

Buried in its settlement reforms, the Home Office is proposing to scrap the Long Residence route. This will be devastating news for many migrants.

The Long Residence Route currently enables individuals who have spent 10 years living lawfully in the UK to apply to settle.

The key thing about the route is that applicants can knit together time spent on various visas – these have been slightly restricted in recent years, but it still includes most – that would otherwise not have been a route to settlement.

So a person who arrived to study as a UK sixth former for 2 years as a Child Student visa holder, and then progressed to studying an undergraduate degree for 3 years on a Student visa, before moving on to the Graduate visa for 2 years, and then being sponsored as a Skilled Worker for a further 3 years, could aggregate this time and apply for settlement after 10 years.

Settlement after 10 years of lawful residence is a very long-standing principle of immigration law and practice: the UK ratified the 1955 European Convention on Establishment in 1969, which made specific provision for foreign nationals who had been lawfully resident for exactly this period of time (Article 3(3)).

In line with this, the Home Office operated a discretionary ‘long residence’ policy for those lawfully resident in the UK for the required 10 years, making specific reference to the provisions of the Convention on Establishment in its policy document.

In April 2003, the policy became paragraph 276B of the Immigration Rules, providing an established route to settlement for those continuously and lawfully resident in the UK for 10 years.

It appears that applying on this basis will no longer be possible. The Home Office hasn’t said in terms that the Long Residence route will be scrapped, but states that this will be the logical conclusion of its proposed reforms:

A consequence of the proposed system is that there will no longer be a separate long residence route. The purpose of the existing long residence route will be superseded by arrangements in which the baseline qualifying period is adjustable for considerations relating to contribution and integration.

It is to be deprecated that its dissolution is not being separately announced, or at least noted on the relevant Long Residence GOV.UK page.

It will be devastating news for many individuals who, in many cases, would have made decisions over a sustained period of time to extend their permission to stay in the UK – at very significant financial cost – with this end goal in mind.

It is a sign of the scale and sweep of the proposed changes that such a major shift is but a footnote, a logical consequence of the changes to come.