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Family visas: Home Office ignored advice to lower minimum income requirements [1]
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Date: 2023-12
The government ignored its own advisers’ recommendations that it should lower the minimum income requirements for family visas before raising the threshold by £20,000 this week, openDemocracy can reveal.
On Monday, home secretary James Cleverly announced that British citizens and those settled in the UK will now need to earn more than £38,700 a year to have their family join them, up from £18,600 previously.
The change, which comes into effect this spring, goes against the advice of the Home Office’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), which urged the government to lower the income requirements three years ago.
In its 2020 annual report, the independent public body accused the government of focusing too much on how much migrants earn and overlooking how they benefit the UK.
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It said that “now would be an opportune time to reconsider the minimum income requirements associated with” family visas.
“The MAC are concerned that previous analysis may have given too much weight to the fiscal contribution of such migrants and insufficient attention to the benefits that accrue, to both the family and society, from the route,” it explained.
Caroline Coombs, the CEO of Reunite Families UK, said it was “outrageous” that the government had increased income requirements after its advisers called for the opposite.
She said: “It also shows how they repeatedly ignore the sufferings that the policy has already caused at its current threshold and which continues to cause countless unnecessary damage to British citizens and their families across the country.
“The emotions are strong within the community but this has galvanised people into action. Threatening your family life will do that to a person. We will use this energy to supercharge this fight for a better and more humane immigration system.”
Only those who are in the top 27th percentile of UK earners will be able to apply for a family visa under the new rules.
Nazek Ramadan, director of Migrant Voice, said: “The existing income requirements have already been shown to rip families apart and leave children without a parent.
“By increasing the requirement to more than double the national minimum wage, this government has effectively told people that only the wealthiest in society are allowed to fall in love with someone from another country.”
An estimated 70,000 people came to the UK on family visas in the year ending June 2023, according to the Office of National Statistics.
The plans to increase minimum income requirements comes just a month after the Home Office raised family visa fees by 20%.
On 4 October, the fees for a spouse or partner visa rose from £1,538 to £1,846. According to campaign group Reunite Charities, the Home Office unit costs of processing a spouse or partner visa are just £366.
Cleverly said that the changes to family visa minimum requirements were necessary because “migration to this country is far too high and needs to come down.”
Provisional estimates suggest that net migration to the UK was 672,000 in the year ending June 2023. The Office of National Statistics said that the estimate was lower than it predicted in December 2022 and that it could “indicate a slowing of immigration coupled with increasing emigration”.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/home-office-family-visa-minimum-income-requirements-migration-advisory-service/
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