LONDON – Authorities in the United Kingdom are set to increase the visa fee for applicants from across the world, it emerged on Friday.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak confirmed on Friday that those who intend to visit the country will now have to pay more as the fees and health surcharge paid towards the UK’s state-funded National Health Service (NHS) by visa applicants are set to rise “significantly”; the reason for the hike seems to be the country’s public sector wage increase.
The hike comes as the British premier has been under immense pressure following an independent review of pay for different professionals. The premier confirmed a hike between 5 and 7 per cent across the board but to bridge the gap, Sunak stressed that additional funding would not be met with higher government borrowing and the burden would have to be shifted somewhere else.
“If we’re going to prioritise paying public sector workers more, that money has to come from somewhere else because I’m not prepared to put up people’s taxes and I don’t think it would be responsible or right to borrow more because that would just make inflation worse,” Sunak told reporters at a Downing Street press conference.
“So, what we have done are two things to find this money. The first is, we are going to increase the charges that we have for migrants who are coming to this country when they apply for visas and indeed something called the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS), which is the levy that they pay to access the NHS,” he said.
“All of those fees are going to go up and that will raise over GBP 1 billion, so across the board visa application fees are going to go up significantly and similarly for the IHS,” he added.
Sunak justified the increase and said this was “entirely right” as these fees have not been increased recently. He opined that the government believes it is appropriate given that the costs have risen since the last hike.
The IHS, which applies to long-term migrants to the kingdom including a discounted rate for students, starts from approximately GBP 470 for a year and increases to thousands of pounds for multiple-year visa applications.
Though the hike has been confirmed, full details of which categories of visas will face a hike and when the new higher rates would be charged would be announced by the UK Home Office in the coming months.
The moves comes amid demands by junior doctors in England who started a five-day strike on Thursday after their demands for a 35 per cent pay hike were rejected.
On the other hand, the British premier seems to have taken firm stand on not giving 35 percent increase, though the general demand seems to have been accepted and that became a reason for visa fee hike.
“There will be no more talks on pay. We will not negotiate again on this year’s settlements and no amount of strikes will change our decision. Instead, the settlement we’ve reached today gives us a fair way to end the strikes. A fair deal for workers and a fair deal for the British taxpayer,” he declared.
