UPFRONT COSTS
Britain currently charges businesses £12,120 for a typical five-year skilled worker visa – nearly 60 per cent more than in 2021, said Louise Haycock, a partner at immigration services firm Fragomen. Adding a partner and two children could push the upfront cost to £30,000.
According to the Royal Society, even Britain’s specialist route for researchers and innovators, the Global Talent Visa, is the most expensive among comparable visas of 18 leading science nations, including the US, China, Japan, France and Germany.
The Society said it was hard to estimate how many people had been discouraged from applying for British jobs.
Cancer Research UK estimates it will spend £700,000 on immigration fees annually – money it says could be used in the fight against cancer.
British fees have been increased as net migration hit record levels in recent years, fuelling a debate over the ability of strained public services to cope with population growth versus the need for foreign workers to drive the economy.
The former Conservative government also raised the minimum salary threshold for immigrant workers by nearly 50 per cent, hoping to deter what it described as “cut-price foreign labour”.
FALLING VISA DEMAND
Visas granted for science, research and engineering roles fell by a third in the second half of 2024 from the same period a year earlier, Home Office data shows. The fall, which followed the increases to the salary threshold and IHS, was broadly in line with a drop in overall work visas.
Alison Noble, a senior academic and the Royal Society’s foreign secretary, said the costs will limit Britain’s ability to court those who may seek to leave the US after Trump’s administration cut funding for universities and research bodies.
“One factor will be, can they afford it, or how open and welcoming is a country?” Noble told Reuters.
Starmer’s artificial intelligence adviser, Matt Clifford, warned in the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan that the “cost and complexity” of visas created barriers for startups and deterred overseas talent from coming to the UK.
Although home to world-famous universities including Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College London, Britain has a severe science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills shortage.
Of 934,000 vacancies recorded in the economy at the end of 2023, about 46 per cent were in STEM-related fields, a University of Cambridge report said last year.
Fragomen’s Haycock said engineering had been hit hard by the salary threshold rising because of its reliance on overseas workers, forcing businesses outside London with typically lower salaries to pay significantly more.
Julia King, a lawmaker who chaired the Science and Technology Committee in parliament’s upper House of Lords until January, described the restrictive visa policy as an “act of national self-harm”.
“If we’re going to get growth in this country, it’s going to be in these knowledge-intensive areas,” King, an engineer who also serves as chancellor at a research university in England, told Reuters. “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot.”
