Party conference season is when parties reflect on and debate policy in a very public way, which can make collective ministerial responsibility (CMR) tricky to manage. That was shown this week when two Cabinet ministers appeared to be in open dispute.
The dispute was over visas for care workers. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood wants care workers on health and care visas to wait 15 years, rather than five, before they can apply for indefinite leave to remain in the UK. The change would apply to people who arrived from 2021 onwards. Between 2022 and 2024, around 185,000 care workers were recruited from overseas on that route.
Communities Secretary Angela Rayner criticised the plans in an interview with The Times on 26 September. Rayner, a former care worker, said they would “change the goalposts” for people who had moved their lives to the UK to look after “our loved ones”. She also stood by her earlier description of the move as “un-British”.
Mahmood and Rayner come from very different wings of the party. Mahmood is on Labour’s right. She has argued that the party must take a tougher line on immigration to win back voters drawn to Reform UK, and she presents control of the borders as a matter of fairness. Rayner is a leading figure on the soft left. She is a former Unison representative with close ties to the trade unions, and she has positioned herself as a champion of workers’ rights. More than 100 Labour MPs and several unions share her opposition to the policy.
In the end, it was Rayner who appeared to backtrack. At the conference in Liverpool, she insisted there “isn’t a split” and praised Mahmood’s record on migration. She may have done this after a word from the Prime Minister. Either way, the episode was a useful reminder that CMR is not always as clear-cut as any Prime Minister would like. That is especially true when, as here, a policy is still being decided, and ministers are tempted to argue their case in public.