For the Conservatives, shadow home secretary Chris Philp said: “It took a year for the home secretary to build her reputation as tough on immigration.
“But what took a year to build, she has just dismantled in 12 short minutes.”
Philp said opposition from fellow ministers and the “Labour open borders left” had resulted in the changes, adding Mahmood was “no longer running the government’s immigration policy”.
He highlighted figures from March in which Home Office calculations suggested 196,000 care workers and their adult dependants could settle between 2026 and 2030, at an estimated lifetime cost of £9.5bn to taxpayers.
Philp said this was the “cost of today’s U-turn”.
But Father of the House Sir Edward Leigh, the longest-serving male MP in the Commons, criticised his Conservative colleague for overseeing the so-called Boriswave after Brexit, where net migration peaked at nearly one million in 2023.
“Some of us don’t have amnesia,” he said. “Many of us in that period in 2023 were putting this to our then government and anybody who was serving as a Home Office minister in that period should wear sackcloth and ashes, and frankly we will never move on until we accept that.”
Philp was a Home Office minister from 2022 to 2024, a period when the government relaxed immigration rules to introduce a post-Brexit Australian-style points-based system and welcomed an influx of non-EU migrants.
Labour MP Diane Abbott welcomed the exemption for care workers from the new ILR arrangements, adding: “But for the rest of the workforce the retrospective nature of these new arrangements still seems to be unfair.
“Because you can come in legally, you can work legally but then have your residency rights turned upside down.”
Mahmood said she did not agree with Abbott’s characterisation, adding every government needs to be able to make changes to immigration rules to respond to circumstances.
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Max Wilkinson said the government’s reforms are “unravelling”.
He added: “Viewing immigration simply as a matter of raw numbers and images of small boat arrivals is degrading this nation’s ability to have the informed national discussion that we need.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage branded the decision “the beginning of the capitulation” and said it would “cost this country a vast amount of money”.
Green Party MP Siân Berry said Mahmood had provided a “new obstacle course of hoops and barriers” for migrants living in the UK.
On Monday, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank said that skilled workers and their dependants due to settle in the UK under current rules are expected to make a net lifetime contribution of around £115bn through the taxes they pay.