Migrant workers who were on track to be granted permanent residency in the UK after five years have told The i Paper that their lives have been “completely upended” by changes to indefinite leave to remain (ILR).
Michaela Chen, 34, got married last year. She was busy trying to plan a life for herself and her husband, but says the changes announced by the Home Secretary this week have left her “questioning everything”.
ILR gives someone the right to live, work and study in the UK for as long as they like, but Government changes mean the standard length of time migrants will have to live in the UK to qualify will double from five to 10 years – and in some cases increase to 20 years.
How you ‘smart fridge’ could be hacked
Household appliances, energy meters and even microwaves are vulnerable to hacking from hostile states, experts have warned.
Here’s how…
Fridge hack
Hackers sent temperatures soaring in supermarket freezers across 10 countries on Tuesday – including Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Sweden.
The incident occurred three weeks after an unprecedented cyber attack caused French freezers to heat to 50°C, spoiling millions of euros worth of food.
How was the attack carried out?
Older internet remote-control boxes that manage refrigeration were targeted with an automatic defrost function, triggering dozens of shops, including IKEA.
Security experts believe a state actor like Russia may be to blame for the attacks, which also affected fridges in a small number of British businesses.
While state-linked attackers are more likely to target supply chains or national infrastructure to cause maximum disruption, experts are now calling for homeowners to reconsider if they need appliances that connect to the internet and action from government.
5 min read
Warnings from the Government
Millions have ‘smart fridges’
A YouGov poll last year showed more than two million Britons have smart fridges.
MP Graeme Downie said people in the UK should reconsider the connected appliances in their homes.
Cellular modules
Downie warned against the use of smart cellular modules that can connect to the internet or mobile network.
What else is vulnerable?
Luke de Pulford, the co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which monitors the threat from Beijing, said any firmware in devices that requires remote software could be vulnerable to hacking from a foreign-based entity.
- “Energy smart meters, microwaves, smart TVs – those are all things that are vulnerable. But also Chinese-made CCTV equipment. These are all devices that are well known to be vulnerable,” he said.
Taking pets abroad may be about to get easier – here’s why
Pet owners are likely to get easier access to the European Union for their pets under a new UK-EU agreement, it has been reported.
Pet passports
Pet passports will be revived under a new UK-EU sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement due to be agreed ahead of a joint summit reports.
Post Brexit, pet owners paid £200 to obtain an animal health certificate in order to take them abroad. Under the proposed deal, pets will now be a given a passport.
New deals with the EU
- 1Travellers will be able to bring their dogs, cats, and ferrets into EU territory for the duration of their lifetime without the need for expensive certificates. This will be implemented from 2028.
- 2UK ministers also hope to agree a deal to give car manufacturers access to the EU’s Made in Europe scheme.
- 3The EU is also looking to agree a youth mobility scheme allowing up to 100,000 Europeans to work aand study in the UK a year. Separately, Brussels is also looking for a reduction in tuition fees for EU students.
UK may have to accept almost 100,000 young Europeans a year to unlock Brexit deal
British negotiators think they can strike a youth mobility agreement with the EU while staying under the “psychologically important” figure of 100,000 visas, The i Paper can reveal.
Why Rice Krispies is no longer made from whole grain rice
Kellogg’s has removed rice grains from its Rice Krispies and Coco Pops cereals after “changing weather conditions” affected the quality and availability of the ingredient, the firm has said.
New formula
Rice Krispies has been reformulated to use rice flour instead of rice, while Coco Pops now contains a blend of rice flour and corn flour in place of rice.
Under the new recipes, the cereals now also contain wheat gluten, meaning they are no longer suitable for shoppers with a wheat allergy or coeliac disease.
Kellogg’s spokeswoman:
“This recent change helps us maintain consistent quality at a time when changing weather conditions are affecting the quality and availability of some of the and grains used in our cereals.”
The change in formula comes after this year’s El Niño weather phenomenon caused widespread droughts, floods and heatwaves across much of Asia where most of the world’s rice comes from.
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What to know as Republicans suffer brutal election losses
The Democrats have made sweeping gains in a bruising night for Donald Trump and the Republicans.
Sweeping victories
The US midterms have seen the Democrats flip key Republican Senate seats in places such as and .
The stunning results have been widely regarded as a consequence of the cost of living crisis which has been driven by the US-Israeli war with Iran. Losing both houses will now make it hard for Trump to drive his legislative agenda.
Key Republican losses in the Senate
Democrat James Talarico defeated Trump-backed Ken Paxton in Texas.
Democrat Sherrod Brown won in Ohio, defeating Republican Jon Husted.
Democrat Annie Andrews beat Trump’s hand-picked candidate Darline Graham to take the seat.
The losses keep coming
Democrat Troy Jackson won, taking the state’s Senate seat for the first time in 29 years.
Abdul El-Sayed is projected to win, becoming the first Muslim senator in US history.
Paralympian Josh Turek won a Senate seat in the state for the first time in 18 years.
Democrats needed a net gain of four seats in the 100-member Senate to win a majority, while in the 435-member House, they needed three. Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff, who won re-election in Georgia, told supporters “the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J Trump”.
Trump’s response:
I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!
Posting on his social media platform Truth Social, the President sought to defend the bruising results.
While offering to work with opponents, he also posted a picture of a red baseball cap emblazoned with the word “Veto”, suggesting he would block legislation they sought to take through Congress.
Watch more from The i Paper
Why you feel completely broke
A decent salary and watching what you spend is increasingly not enough for people to feel well off– here’s why.
Cost of living
The UK is suffering the worst decade in terms of the growth in household incomes since records began.
Due to cost of living pressures and a lack of substantial wage growth, leading think-tanks like the Resolution Foundation predict that a typical working-age household will see their disposable income fall by £1,050 or 3 per cent between now and 2029.
Disposable income growing slower
Slow growth, inflation and stubbornly high housing costs are the main culprits. While disposable incomes fluctuated throughout the 1970s and 80s, they generally rose again after a fall. Not so since the 2008 global financial crisis, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic.
3 min read
House prices rising faster
The average house price in the UK is currently around 6.5 times the average income, compared to around 3.5 times in 1996 and 2.5 times in 1966.
- One could argue that it is why Andy Burnham thinks Britain should rejoin the European Union and why we’ve heard so much about growth – now rebranded as “good growth” – in order to improve incomes.
More people paying higher rate income tax
One of the major reasons behind stagnated income growth is the constant freezing of tax thresholds – levels that won’t change until 2030.
You are now dragged into paying the higher tax rate of 40 per cent if you earn £50,271 or more. You stay in that bracket until you earn £125,000, but at £100,000 a year you lose your personal tax-free allowance and your entitlement to state-funded free childcare.
The NHS blood test which could find several cancers
Blood tests capable of detecting signs of several cancers from a single sample will be offered to NHS patients in a world-first trial.
New blood tests
Thousands of patients will be invited to take part in the Stride-RCT study, which aims to catch cancers at a time when treatment is more likely to succeed.
The tests – which use AI and other cutting-edge technology – could also help GPs identify patients with cancers that are difficult to diagnose.
How will the tests be rolled out?
Who is eligible?
More than 20,000 patients aged 45 or older will be invited to take part.
The tests will be offered to patients who present with symptoms such as persistent bloating or abdominal discomfort.
Where will they be available?
The £8.5m government-funded trial will be offered in more than 200 GPs across England.
How do the tests work?
The tests are designed to detect signs of cancers including bowel, pancreatic, ovarian, stomach, liver, kidney, bladder and prostate cancer.
Some work by identifying tiny fragments of DNA that are shed into the bloodstream by tumours. Others measure proteins in the blood, or use AI to analyse results.
The tests aim not only to identify possible cancer cells but also to indicate where in the body it may be developing.
6 min read
Watch more from The i Paper
How autism diagnoses are ‘increasingly linked to ADHD’
Experts found a rapid rise in autism diagnoses among 16-to 20-year-olds since 2010 in the UK, as well as a rise in women and white people, compared to other ethnicities.
What were the findings?
Researchers from the Medical Research Council looked at data from the UK and Sweden.
They found that new diagnoses have increased from six people per 100,000 in 2010, to 64 per 100,000 in 2023.
Analysis also showed there has been a change in the make-up of people diagnosed with autism, with a decrease in those with a prior diagnosis of epilepsy.
Instead, they found an increase in the proportion of people who had a prior diagnosis of ADHD, stress-related disorders, eating disorders, headaches and chronic fatigue.
The story in numbers
58%
The proportion of autism diagnoses in people with anxiety more than doubled form 29 per cent to 58 per cent between 2010 and 2023.
- In the UK, 24.5 million adults contributed to the study, including 141,119 with an autism diagnosis.
- Writing in , the team said this could be the result of “greater appreciation of nuanced forms of autism that may have previously been labelled as other conditions due to overlapping features, particularly in females”.
How menopause is affecting women’s careers and pensions
Half of women in the perimenopause or menopause say their career has suffered as a result, with workers cutting their hours or feeling forced to turn down opportunities for career progression, according to a new survey.
Lack of support for symptoms
Nearly one in three said their life stage had influenced their retirement savings, according to the research for Scottish Widows. A similar number also said their regular finances had been affected.
And 50 per cent of women surveyed said they would like more support at work. 17 per cent said they had been forced to take time away to manage symptoms.
Breaking down the numbers
- One in eight (13 per cent) women had reduced their working hours and 10 per cent had turned down a promotion or career progression opportunity, for menopause-related reasons.
Scottish Widows found that a 50-year-old woman in full-time work taking a six-month unpaid break could potentially cost £1,300 in pension contributions.
Gaps in pension contributions will have a bigger impact over time, as savers will also miss out on the interest that could have been earned on them.
Two-thirds of women surveyed believe employers should be required to provide better support to women experiencing menopause symptoms, including financial support.
A blow to pension pots
Perimenopause or often coincides with what should be the peak earnings potential of a woman’s career. When symptoms force women to reduce their hours, step back from promotion opportunities or leave work entirely, the ripple effect on their pension pots is huge
Susan Hope, a retirement expert at Scottish Widows
Chen is one of the 2.2 million people who were on a path to permanent settlement in the UK. She moved to London from Canada in 2020 to study a master’s degree at LSE. Since then, she has met and married her husband and built a life for herself in the capital.
Instead of being in a “honeymoon bubble”, however, for the past year, she says she and her partner have been plagued by “constant stress” as they waited for Shabana Mahmood to announce her long-awaited visa reforms.
On Monday, Chen learned she was one of approximately 500,000 people who discovered the time before they are eligible for ILR has doubled from five to 10 years.
“We knew what was coming for a long time,” she said, “but still I didn’t sleep last night.” She told The i Paper that the ILR extension has left her feeling “sad, frustrated, and completely isolated… you work so hard to make a new country you’re home, but then you’re made to feel like you’re still not welcome.
“I work hard, I pay my taxes, I do volunteer work, I even learnt about football – and yet it’s not enough”.
Chen said the changes have left her feeling like she is in limbo. Fees such as the immigration health surcharge – which allows access to the NHS and costs £3,105 for a three-year visa – “is going make affording to start a family more difficult, but moving to Canada isn’t a viable option because we have caring responsibilities in the UK”.
Under the new rules, those earning less than £50,271 will have to wait a decade before they can apply for ILR.
There are ways migrants can fast-track their route to settlement, however. High earners on a salary of £125,000 or more only need to wait three years before applying, while for those making more than £50,271 the wait will remain at five years.
The Home Secretary was also forced to back down over proposals to make care workers wait 15 years to qualify for permanent residency.
‘I can’t plan a future’
Martin, 29, who asked to keep his last name private, moved to the UK five years ago to study a master’s degree at Leeds University, and now works in the charity sector. With less than six months until his visa runs out, he worries that will not be the case for much longer.
Martin was one of a record number of foreign university students who came to the UK during the so-called “Boris wave” – a surge in post-Brexit, non-EU migration under then prime minister Boris Johnson – and was only two years away from being eligible for ILR.
Working in the charity sector, however, he does not earn more than £50,271. “Even if I got a promotion to a managerial position, I wouldn’t get paid that much,” he said.
Martin’s dream is to become a journalist, which he is studying for alongside working full-time, but his “ability to envision a future” for himself is becoming “increasingly squeezed”.
Martin’s visa expires early next year, and his current employer is unable to renew his visa sponsorship. Over the past year he has applied for over 200 jobs but has found it “impossible” to find a workplace in his sector that will sponsor him.
“It’s stressful, not being able to plan for your future,” he added. Martin was born in America but raised in Mexico. “If I have to leave, it’s not the first time I’ve had to start over my life, but this time, I don’t know where I am supposed to go”.
‘Life has become so precarious’
Samantha Connor, 25, moved to Edinburgh from Oklahoma, USA, and going back is not an option. “It’s socially a very conservative place – I wouldn’t be safe there.” But she says her plans have been “completely upended” by the changes to ILR, and she is now at least nine years away being eligible for it.
“I will have lived in the UK for 16-17 years at that point,” she told The i Paper.
“But that life will be so precarious, because you don’t know if one day they [the Home Office] are going to turn around and change the goalposts again”.
Connor first moved to the UK to study at university and spent six years on a student visa, then a graduate visa.
She is now one year into a skilled worker visa, which she hoped would allow her to apply for ILR in four years.
However as she earns under £50,000 she now faces waiting for at least nine years.
Overnight, her younger sister, who is studying in Glasgow, has realised she will be unable to stay in the UK. “It’s sad – it was so good to be close to her when the rest of my family is thousands of miles away, but you wake up one day and you’re back to square one”.
“I’ve lived in the UK my whole adult life. My friends, my career, my partner and her family are all rooted here. I don’t know how to live anywhere else.”
“Indefinite leave to remain used to feel secure – but now it feels like the Government [is] punishing those of us who do things the legal way”.