Turkish Settlement Grants Fall 78% as MPs Warn of a Windrush Repeat

Grants of settlement to Turkish nationals on the European Community Association Agreement route fell by 78 per cent in the first half of this year. Between January and June 2025 the Home Office granted indefinite leave to remain to 3,378 people on that route. In the same months of 2026 the figure was 745. The Guardian reports a sharp rise in refusals on applications lodged since September 2025, and lawyers and MPs are using the word Windrush. The Home Office says there has been no change to the way these cases are assessed, and that each one is still decided on its own facts under the published rules.

The route, often called the Ankara Agreement, let Turkish nationals come to Britain to set up a business. It closed to new applicants after Brexit. People already here can still extend their stay and apply for settlement after five years of continuous residence. That is the group now hitting a wall. David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, which has a large Turkish-speaking community, says constituents who built families and businesses while following the rules have been refused, and that the cases remind him of the Windrush scandal. He wants the department to go back to the lessons of the independent review. Bambos Charalambous and Feryal Clark have written with him to the immigration minister, Jo White.

Errors that decide a life

The MPs' letter, sent after a volume of constituency cases, says solicitors report a shift. Assessments of whether a business is genuine are giving way to searches for technical faults. Errors on invoices and small inconsistencies are being used as reasons to refuse. In one case a business owner was recorded as having left the country in a week when they attended a Home Office appointment in person. In another, officials are said to have miscounted the days spent abroad. Either mistake can end an application that has taken years to build.

Delay does its own damage. The MPs say hundreds of applicants are waiting longer than six months. People whose leave is extended by section 3C of the Immigration Act 1971, while a decision is pending, can find they cannot travel, cannot easily sign a new business lease, and cannot plan investment. The letter warns that the uncertainty can itself threaten the business on which eligibility for settlement depends. A refusal, or a long wait that starves the business, points toward removal for people who have been in Britain lawfully for years.

A harder settlement policy in the background

The rise in refusals lines up, in the Guardian's account, with applications made from September 2025, shortly before Shabana Mahmood set out tougher conditions for leave to remain at the Labour conference. The department's answer is that the ECAA rules themselves are unchanged. In a written answer on 19 October, Jo White pointed MPs to the published settlement tables and said operational data showed decisions running ahead of new applications, with the outstanding caseload down and the route on course to return to its service standard. That is a picture of a queue being cleared. It leaves the collapse in grants unexplained.

The wider policy has already moved. Mahmood has kept a five-year path for care workers already in the country, while most other migrants face ten years and people who arrived on small boats face twenty or thirty. The Turkish business route was supposed to be one of the settled exceptions: a closed door for newcomers, and a kept promise for those inside. Sunday's figures ask whether that promise is being kept in the decision letters, or only in the guidance. The Home Office says the guidance still governs. Lammy says the outcomes look like a lesson the department has already had to learn once.