None of what follows depends on public opinion validating it. Whether a policy manufactures child poverty and destitution is not a question that polling gets to settle. 

Little to do with the underlying evidence on NRPF changed since 2019; if anything, the heightened risks of death, destitution and disrespect migrants face, which was laid bare during the pandemic and the hostility towards migrants and the accompanying misinformation have made the relevance of rigorously captured data all the more important and all the more necessary as a cornerstone for policymaking.  

The “guiding light” of this new politics appears to be the Labour Party’s November 2025 “Restoring Order and Control” white paper. Mahmood’s asylum and settlement reforms, collected in that paper, can only be read as the parties’ attempt to harden the system to blunt the advance of Reform and Restore. Based on the logic that compassion towards migrants was a liability to be managed, rather than a position worth defending in public. 

As with most policies, it generally takes years before you’re in a position to evaluate their effects properly, and time will tell with respect to Labour’s efforts to “restore order”, as most changes are infantile or yet to be implemented. However, when optics take centre stage and almost overshadow the policy itself in importance, as many have accused this package of doing, it becomes easier to judge early. From this point of view, it’s hard to call this a success. Labour lost heavily in the May 2026 local elections, resignations aplenty, and Starmer himself quitting as Prime Minister, leading to Burnham’s own ascension to the top job. Whatever combination of factors explains that collapse, take your pick; the government’s rightward turn on immigration does not look, in retrospect, anything like a saving grace. 

NRPF is a condition that restricts access to a range of benefits listed as public funds for immigration purposes. The condition applies to most, but not all, temporary migrants’ permission to enter or stay in the UK as determined by the route they apply for within the Immigration Rules. It’s application has been found unlawful by British courts on four separate occasions: for failing to let people apply for relief before reaching destitution, for failing to safeguard the welfare of children, for falling short of the public sector equality duty, and for allowing delays that breached human rights. 

The government’s stated aims for NRPF are to reduce the burden on the taxpayer, promote integration, and build public support for immigration. On each of these measures, a reasonable case can be made that the policy does the opposite. 

On reducing taxpayer burden, the policy does not clearly reduce costs in the long-run so much as shift them. Two independent assessments have reached conclusions about the policy that do not read kindly against these intentions. A November 2024 report from the Trust for London and the Centre for Social Policy Studies concluded, in its own words, that “NRPF conditions should be removed completely.” A 2022 London School of Economics analysis commissioned by the Greater London Authority, which asked whether the gains from scrapping NRPF in London would outweigh the costs, found that doing so “would produce gains in excess of costs.” Migrants on the routes affected by NRPF are, on average, a net positive for public finances, they arrive at working age, pay taxes, pay the NHS surcharge, and pay visa fees running into the thousands, all while being barred from drawing on the funds their contributions help pay for through their taxes, visa fees and migrant-specific payments like the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS). Local authorities have statutory duties to support children in need and vulnerable adults. Yet, the central government provides no dedicated funding for this, creating an unfunded parallel welfare system that can be characterised as suffering from gatekeeping not confined to a few local authorities. This unfunded support provided by local authorities across the UK accounted for nearly £100 million in 2024/25, with Scottish local authorities spending in the region of £6 million. These downstream interventions overwhelmingly come at cost ratios far higher than those of similar support provided through conventional welfare benefits, which are locked behind the public funds label. The cost-saving logic behind NRPF is, at the very least, open to challenge.  

On promoting integration, both the evidence and the underlying logic lead us in the opposite direction: as evidenced in Dutch and Swiss studies, secure residence status most often functions as a precondition for social integration, not as a reward that follows once someone has proven themselves sufficiently integrated; gaining citizenship caused lasting improvements in political participation and knowledge, in long-term earnings and labour-market attachment, and in measures of social integration, including reduced feelings of isolation and discrimination, with the largest gains among the most marginalised immigrants and among those granted status earlier rather than later. The logic behind that finding does not depend on citizenship specifically, and it is not complicated. Someone who does not know whether they will still be permitted to live in the UK in five or ten years has less reason to make the investments that integration is usually made of, putting down a deposit, building a local support network, training for a trade, keeping a child in the same school for years running, because those investments only pay off if the person is still there to see them through. NRPF and the years of contingent status that now typically precede any route out of it extend exactly that period of uncertainty rather than shorten it, under the proposals Burnham has endorsed. 

On public support, the picture is more mixed than the one-sided mandate the policy is sometimes assumed to have, and it shifts noticeably depending on how the question is asked. Asked specifically about migrants who are working and paying tax in the UK, around two-thirds of adults in Great Britain told the National Centre for Social Research they should be able to claim the same welfare benefits as British citizens within three years of arrival. Only 30% backed a wait of five years or longer, roughly where NRPF and the current settlement route already sit.. Separate polling in 2025 by the Early Education and Childcare Coalition found a 55% agreement that children should be able to access childcare and early education regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Expanding on these two data points, public opinion sits left of where Labour’s proposals are heading. This is not unanimous support for scrapping the condition, and other polling, asking a blunter question about “immigrants” in the abstract, rather than about people already working and contributing or children, has found majorities in favour of restricting access to benefits for several years. But that variation is itself informative: support for NRPF looks considerably softer once the question is anchored to the population it actually affects rather than to the vaguer and often inaccurate picture of the ‘immigrant’ label that tends to dominate public debate. 

Burnham’s support for the Home Secretary’s “earned settlement” proposals is significant. Read alongside his change of heart on NRPF, it’s a clear expression of  what looks like his new prime-ministerial politics. Recent analysis from the Work Rights Centre, based on Home Office data, finds that upwards of two million people could be negatively impacted by these changes, including half a million children. As of 31 December 2025, between 2.06 million and 2.47 million people held an immigration status that directly leads to settlement. Among them are between 426,000 and 593,000 children. 

The potential human cost is staggering. Independent analysis commissioned by the NRPF Partnership and carried out by Landman Economics and IPPR estimates that the Government’s earned settlement rules could prolong poverty for up to 90,000 children of migrant workers by 2029. If the route to settlement is extended to ten years as proposed, half of all children with parents on work routes could be living in poverty by 2029, around 130,000 children in total. These evaluations read awkwardly against with the British Government’s own Child Poverty Strategy, which aims to “give every child the chance of a positive childhood” and the Scottish Government’s guarantee to “get it right for every child“. 

The retrospective application of these rules is particularly cruel. Those who arrived in the UK and planned their lives around a five-year path to settlement now face a broken promise. In our submission to the Routes to Settlement consultation, one partner offered a stark assessment of what a prolonged period would mean: “a prolonged period like that would only cause further hardship, I don’t know what else to say.” The Home Affairs Select Committee warned that the policy would cause “many children [to] spend most of their childhood with temporary status,” jeopardising integration and a sense of belonging, and “lead to more child poverty.” 

Shabana Mahmood herself confirmed the proposed catchment population “everyone in the country today who has not already received indefinite leave to remain,” meaning those who were promised a half-decade waiting period will have their path redrawn with no notice. As one member of our Lived Experience Group put it, “If your landlord changed your contract halfway through, you could go to court. Here, we’ve followed every rule, and still, they can double the time and cost with no recourse. It feels like being punished for doing the right thing.” 

None of this means Burnham cannot change course, and it would be a mistake to treat a campaign position as fixed and final; politicians recalibrate constantly. But the timing here is hard to ignore. Burnham is not simply a mayor whose views on immigration policy carry the usual weight of one voice among many; within weeks, he may be the person deciding whether Mahmood’s proposals become law. The case he himself set out in 2023, that British immigration manufactures homelessness and destitution rather than preventing it, has not weakened; what has, is his willingness to say so. 

There is still time for Burnham and his team to, for lack of a better term, reverse this reversal. His ascension to PM did not come off the back of a general election or a leadership race, and a position taken during and in the aftermath of a unique by-election campaign need not be fixed. We do not believe that being pro-NRPF means you cannot be pro-migrant, but it makes the mental gymnastics far more complex and, in the end, is, for the most part, incompatible. 

Burnham’s backtracking has not occurred in a vacuum. Over the past year, anti-migrant demonstrations in Britain have repeatedly tipped into violence, attacks on asylum accommodation, assaults on people assumed to be migrants, and a climate where Reform UK’s framing sets the terms of debate rather than responding to it. Against that backdrop, a Labour government is now the one proposing to strip refugees of permanent status, extend the wait for settlement to a decade or more, and reportedly consider forcibly returning the families of people it deems to have entered “illegally.” The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JWCI) letter to Burnham does not mince words about that, describing the settlement changes as racist and classist and the family-returns plan as fascistic. 

This does change what happens on the ground: fewer allies inside government means less pressure to fund what’s needed, and that shortfall lands on the families who go without. But it won’t touch the resolve of the people doing the work. Local authorities and third-sector organisations will continue to provide the support that central government won’t fund, regardless of who controls Downing Street. 

Much of what Burnham inherits  is a legacy of the hostile environment, an approach formalised in 2012 that used cost and bureaucratic friction, rather than explicit exclusion, to discourage migrants from remaining in the UK.  

There are three concrete places he could start unwinding. On visa fees, bring them back down to what they were meant to cover: Until 2004, Home Office fees only covered the cost of processing an application; since then they have been used to fund enforcement and border spending, and in 2024/25 the Home Office’s visa and immigration income reached £3 billion, more than a third of its entire £8 billion border budget. Add the surcharge and the employer levy, and a five-year Skilled Worker visa now costs around £12,500, roughly ten times the average cost of equivalent visas across the sixteen other leading science nations, as evidenced in 2025 by the Royal Society; early-career researchers on postdoctoral salaries have reported visa costs alone eating up close to a tenth of what they earn in a year.  

On NRPF, expand the provision on Change of Conditions and remove the gatekeeping of specific “public funds”, particularly homelessness assistance, which would help dismantle a system that manufactures destitution, although it stops short of what we believe is necessary: the abolition of the condition.  

On settlement, guarantee transitional protection for anyone already partway through the five-year route, whatever else changes. Burnham has made his new position on no recourse to public funds quite clear; none of what is mentioned here requires him to abandon that position, although we would implore him to do so.