UK Migration — The 2022-2024 ILR Cohort
A standalone analysis of the 2022-2024 net-migration peak ("Boriswave" in informal political usage). The cohort that arrived during the 2022-2024 net migration peak (906,000 in 2023) is now reaching the five-year settlement window, which is the source of much of the political pressure on settlement-rule reform. The piece walks the cohort, the route mix, what the evidence says about their fiscal trajectories, and the policy options the master document's options menu attaches to this question.
19. The Pre-2026 ILR Cohort ("Boriswave"): A Dedicated Analysis
What this section is
This section addresses what the gaps review correctly identified as the most politically central object of UK migration policy 2025-2030, currently named in the master document but not analysed at the depth its centrality warrants. The "Boriswave" — the cohort of migrants admitted under the substantially liberalised post-2020 framework, principally 2022-2024 — is the single largest decision facing UK migration policy this Parliament.
Scale and composition
The Home Office's own published estimates, set out in the Earned Settlement consultation document of November 2025, project that under previous ILR rules approximately 1.3 to 2.2 million migrants would have become eligible for settlement between 2026 and 2030. The central forecast is 1.6 million.
Compositionally, the cohort is dominated by two routes that were dramatically expanded in the 2020-2022 period:
The Health and Care Worker visa. Reforms removed the salary floor and added care workers to the shortage occupation list in February 2022. Between 2022 and 2024, approximately 616,000 individuals arrived through this route. The Home Secretary's November 2025 statement to the House noted that more than half of these were dependants rather than primary care workers. The original Home Office estimate of need was 6,000-40,000 jobs; the actual inflow exceeded this by an order of magnitude. Subsequent enforcement action against sponsors revealed substantial abuse — sponsorship licences revoked, workers found to be unemployed or in unrelated work, and trafficking cases.
The post-Brexit Skilled Worker route. Lower salary and skill thresholds than the previous Tier 2 system, plus the removal of the resident labour market test. Between 2021 and 2024, Skilled Worker grants ran at substantially higher volumes than the Tier 2 era. Median earnings for Skilled Worker main applicants outside health and care had median earnings of £56,600 (HMRC/Home Office linked data, May 2025) — well above both the salary threshold and the UK full-time median comparator used in this document.
Other routes (student-to-skilled-worker switches, family route, Graduate route) contribute additional volume.
Why this matters
For the fiscal frame: the MAC December 2025 modelling shows substantial route-level variation. Skilled Worker main applicants outside health and care are positive (+£689,000 lifetime per person) but Health and Care Worker dependants are negative (-£67,000) and Family partner route is negative (-£109,000). The Boriswave is disproportionately weighted toward routes with weaker fiscal performance because the Health and Care visa dependant cohort is the largest single component.
For the political frame: this cohort settling under previous rules would generate ILR grants in 2027-2029 substantially exceeding any historical UK precedent. The Home Office's central forecast peak of approximately 359,000 ILR grants in 2028 (under unchanged rules) compares with the previous peak of approximately 240,000 in 2010. Several years exceeding the 2010 peak in succession would be a fundamental shift in the UK settled population structure.
For the cohesion frame: the pace of arrival 2022-2024 was unprecedented in modern UK history. Pace effects on cohesion (per the Casey Review and the Cantle tradition) are amplified relative to either smaller cohorts arriving over the same period or this cohort arriving over a longer period. Settlement of this cohort en masse extends the pace effects from arrival into the settlement and citizenship pipeline.
For the demographic frame: the Boriswave shifts the UK working-age age structure favourably in the short term (most arrivals are working-age) but adds substantial dependants who are not currently in the workforce. Net demographic effect depends on subsequent labour market integration outcomes which are not yet measured at the cohort level.
For the protection frame: this section is mostly distinct from refugee questions because the Boriswave is overwhelmingly economic migration, not asylum-route migration. Refugee numbers in the same period are an order of magnitude smaller.
The Earned Settlement response
The Labour government's Earned Settlement framework, consulted on November 2025 to February 2026, is explicitly designed to address this cohort. Key elements as currently consulted:
- Standard ILR qualifying period extended from 5 to 10 years for most routes
- For roles below RQF Level 6 (including health and care positions), qualifying period potentially up to 15 years
- High earners (above £50,270 / £125,140 thresholds) retain shorter qualifying periods of 3-5 years
- "Earned" status linked to four pillars: character, integration (B2 English plus Life in UK), contribution (NI contributions on earnings above £12,570 for 3-5 years), and continuous residence
- Refugees on core protection: 20-year qualifying period (from the March 2026 reforms)
- Safe-and-legal-route arrivals: 10 years
- Implementation pushed from original April 2026 target to "later in 2026"
The government's published intention is explicitly to apply these changes to migrants already in the UK who have not yet obtained settled status. This is the politically and legally consequential element. Earned Settlement is not solely prospective from the date of legislation — it changes the rules under which the existing Boriswave cohort qualifies.
The Home Office's own behavioural assumption: 10-20% reduction in affected inflows from the policy package as a whole. The cohort already in the UK is the largest component the policy is designed to address.
What is contested
Whether retrospective application is lawful. The Earned Settlement consultation explicitly proposes applying changes to people already in the UK on existing visas. This raises Article 8 ECHR family life questions where settlement decisions affect British-citizen children, Article 1 of Protocol 1 questions on legitimate expectations and accrued rights, and Article 14 discrimination questions where implementation has differential effect by route or nationality. Legal challenges are highly likely; outcomes are uncertain. The legal frame is closer to "changing the rules during the qualifying period" than to "retrospective rescission" of granted status, which makes it less legally exposed than full retrospective rescission but still substantially exposed.
Whether the volume reduction is sufficient. Charlie Cole's analysis in The Critic (January 2026; The Critic is a centre-right magazine and Cole writes from a restrictionist perspective — the underlying figures verify against the Home Office command paper), working from the Home Office's own published projections, suggests that even under the "low case" scenario the 2010 peak is exceeded in 2027, 2028 and 2029. Critics from the right argue the package addresses the cohort partially but does not prevent the unprecedented settlement bulge. Critics from the left argue the package creates a status-uncertain underclass for 10-15 years with measurable integration and welfare costs.
Whether health and care workforce can be sustained. The Health and Care Worker route was closed to new overseas recruitment in July 2025. Existing workers can extend and switch but the steady-state replacement pipeline is constrained. The Home Affairs Committee March 2026 report flagged that hundreds of thousands of care workers face uncertain futures while replacement domestic workforce has not materialised at the rate required. Earned Settlement at 15 years for below-RQF6 routes (where most care workers sit) intensifies the workforce-retention question because workers face longer paths to settlement than other routes.
The political alignment
Labour: the Earned Settlement package is the central response. The framework gives Labour a serious-looking package without the legal exposure of Reform's retrospective rescission proposal, while still substantially addressing the cohort.
Conservative: The 5-to-10 year extension was a Badenoch announcement before Labour formalised it. Conservative position is broadly aligned with Labour direction but proposes harder thresholds and faster implementation. The "Boriswave" framing creates a Conservative vulnerability — these arrivals occurred under Conservative governments — that Conservative messaging has not yet fully resolved.
Reform: Proposes full ILR abolition for new applicants and rescission with re-application at £60,000 threshold for existing ILR holders. The retrospective rescission of existing ILR is the legally weakest element (existing ILR holders have stronger vested rights than people who have not yet qualified). Reform's £14.3 billion fiscal saving claim relates partly to this cohort but lacks a published model.
Restore Britain: Larger ambition than Reform, less specified mechanism. The Boriswave is treated as evidence for fundamental reset rather than addressed through specific policy.
Lib Dem, Green, SNP, Plaid: Generally oppose retrospective application of Earned Settlement, supporting prospective-only changes. Concerned about creating status-uncertain underclasses and about workforce effects in care and other sectors. Argue that fiscal projections of cohort cost are sensitive to integration assumptions that policy can affect.
DUP: Generally aligned with the contribution-based principle but with NI-specific care workforce concerns given the cross-border labour market.
What the data does and does not adjudicate
The data confirms scale (the cohort exists at the volume named), composition (dominated by Health and Care visa and Skilled Worker route), fiscal variation by sub-route (Skilled Worker main applicants positive, Health and Care dependants negative), and behavioural-response uncertainty (the 10-20% inflow reduction is a Home Office assumption, not a measurement).
The data does not adjudicate whether the Earned Settlement framework's retrospective application will survive legal challenge, whether the workforce trajectory in care can be sustained, what the cohort's actual long-term contribution will be (because it depends on subsequent earnings trajectories not yet observed), or what political consequences flow from any specific volume of 2027-2030 ILR grants.
The Boriswave is the central decision the current Parliament will take on settled population. Every party has positioned around it; the data informs but does not resolve the choice.