Labour must end the skilled worker visa ‘clock reset’ that traps migrant partners in bad relationships’

My friend (I’ll call her Maria) and her partner are both well-paid migrant professionals. Her partner got a job offer first, so he applied for a Skilled Worker visa, and she became his dependant. Then Covid happened. The isolation and months of remote work from their tiny flat didn’t go well for them as a couple, so Maria looked into her options. After all, she was clearly eligible for her own Skilled Worker visa.

That’s when she realised that the Immigration Rules trapped her in the relationship. Breaking up would mean restarting the five years of uncertainty before settlement and more than £5,000 in fees.

Our current immigration rules on settlement for skilled workers don’t take the residence period on the Dependant Visa into account. This means that switching from a Skilled Worker Dependant to a Skilled Worker route “resets the clock” on settlement. A Dependant partner, even when they are eligible for their own path to settlement, has to bear the cost and risk of starting their settlement anew if they want to be independent.

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We are penalising workers for one of the most private choices in their lives. While the proposed changes to the immigration system have drawn justified criticism, they are also an opportunity to fix existing injustices. Removing the clock reset is an obvious one.

Maria’s relationship bounced back in the end. Many would not be so lucky. By my estimate (based on Home Office data) in 2024 there were over 40,000 people who could potentially be trapped in the same way. Skilled workers are the biggest group of migrants eligible for settlement in the UK. About half of skilled workers have partners, and they usually take the dependant route. More than two thirds of such partners are in work, and two thirds of partners are women.

Both the number of affected people and the severity of the penalty will increase under the proposed reform. The “clock reset” policy should be abolished.

We do not yet know the specifics of the Skilled Worker Dependant pathway to settlement that the Government will put forward. Dependants’ settlement is complex, as the Home Affairs Committee’s latest Routes to Settlement report points out. Unfortunately, the Committee chose not to include the submitted evidence on the clock reset issue. The report recommends assessing contributions at the household level instead, ignoring potential changes to relationship status. Unless the Government pays attention to this scenario, we risk the injustice quietly surviving the reform. 

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The case for removing an unfair penalty on tens of thousands of working people seems self-evident to me, but there are broader benefits to counting the period on the Dependant pathway towards settlement.

It would help protect partners, primarily women, from bad relationships that don’t meet the threshold for abuse. We have a domestic abuse settlement pathway, but not all bad relationships cross this threshold, and not all partners are ready to escalate to a formal accusation.

It would give working migrant couples more freedom to arrange childcare responsibilities. A partner holding a Skilled Worker visa cannot leave their job to care for a child, even if their partner earns more than they do. If partners could “switch places” and still retain their settlement period, it would give migrant families a freedom that most workers born in Britain take for granted.

It would be consistent with the Government’s stated intention to attract high-skilled migrant workers. While most of the public attention is rightly drawn to the negative impacts of the proposed rules, these are clearly designed to favour high-skilled economic migration. This intention is incompatible with an arbitrary penalty on people like Maria.

The main monetary cost of abolishing the clock reset is a decrease in the per-year NHS surcharge collected from people who decide to restart their path to settlement. However, the number of such people is small, and behavioural effects reduce it further. A lot of people would just wait rather than bear the cost.

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Another possible objection is that removing the reset might create new loopholes. It won’t, because in this scenario the dependant still needs to satisfy all requirements of the Skilled Worker route.

Removing the reset and protecting working people should be an easy decision for a Labour government, but the window to do this is closing as the new Rules are being written. We need to abolish the clock reset before the clock runs out.

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