Mahmood seeks to sack Mike Tapp over settlement policy article

Shabana Mahmood asked Sir Keir Starmer to sack Mike Tapp after he wrote an unauthorised article backing an exemption for foreign care workers from her plans to tighten settlement rules. No 10 stood by Tapp for now, but the row put a public crack in Labour’s handling of one of its most politically sensitive files: immigration and earned settlement.

Tapp’s article in The Times argued that people already working in the UK care system should not have to wait longer to qualify for indefinite leave to remain. Mahmood’s plan would double the qualifying period for settlement from five years to 10 years for many migrants, a major shift in the legal migration model that she has described as the biggest overhaul in 50 years. The dispute was not just about one minister’s judgment. It raised the question of whether Starmer’s operation can keep policy disciplined when senior figures start freelancing on the government’s most exposed issues.

That question mattered because Tapp was not a backbencher speaking off-script. He had been appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Home Office on 6 September 2025, after being elected MP for Dover and Deal in July 2024. His portfolio covered immigration rules, Border Force operations, earned settlement and citizenship reform, nationality, Windrush, visas and the future borders system, which made his intervention harder for Mahmood to ignore. The ministerial code requires ministers to support the government publicly and keep disagreements private, so her move to force him out carried the risk of turning a policy disagreement into a question of discipline inside the government itself.

The settlement overhaul sits inside a broader political reset on migration. In Mahmood’s immigration speech, government figures said 616,000 people arrived through the health and care visa route between 2022 and 2024, after minimum salary requirements were dropped, even though the route had been intended to fill between 6,000 and 40,000 jobs. The same speech said 400,000 people had claimed asylum since 2021, and that net migration over that period amounted to 2.6 million more people moving to Britain than leaving. Against that backdrop, Tapp’s intervention exposed how fragile internal message control can become when ministers start staking out exceptions in public, and how quickly a technical policy fight can become a test of cabinet authority.