Badenoch Proposes 10-Year Wait for Immigrants to Claim Benefits and Citizenship

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has made a renewed call for stricter controls on both legal and illegal immigration, arguing that the current system is fundamentally unfair to hardworking British citizens.

In a piece published in the Daily Mail UK, Badenoch wrote: “The issue of immigration is a simple one for the Conservative Party: we need to crack down on it in every form, both legal and illegal.”

“For me, this is about basic fairness,” she continued. “Britain today seems to work more favourably for those who jump the queue, who break the rules, who get into our country illegally but then denigrate our customs and our culture.”

She expressed frustration that law-abiding citizens who contribute to society are left “footing the bill,” while rule-breakers benefit from the system.

Badenoch criticized the billions spent on housing asylum seekers in hotels and highlighted what she described as a lesser-known loophole: “Low-paid immigrants and refugees who stay here for five years qualify for ‘indefinite leave to remain’, granting them access to the same benefits as British citizens—whether or not they’ve paid taxes.”

“To my mind, that is fundamentally unfair to all the hard-working Brits who have dutifully paid into the system – and I’m determined to stop it,” she said.

Turning her attention to the Labour Government, Badenoch accused the opposition of blocking key immigration reforms, including the Deportation Bill, which she said would have introduced a strict cap on immigration, extended the residency requirement for benefits from five to ten years, and applied the same ten-year rule to citizenship applications.

“To make sure those who come here are serious about contributing to our society, rather than just ripping it off, the Bill would have barred anyone who’d claimed benefits from getting indefinite leave to remain,” she explained. “It would also have given the government the power to revoke settled status from anyone convicted of a crime.”

“That Bill was designed to protect our borders and uphold fairness in our benefits system. But thanks to Labour, it was shot down.”

Badenoch also acknowledged the legal and international hurdles that have hampered immigration policy in recent years. She pointed to the failure of the Rwanda deportation scheme as an example of how domestic courts and “unnamed foreign judges” interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) have blocked Conservative efforts.

“Other potentially transformative policies of ours have floundered in similar ways,” she added.