In order to cover the country’s public sector pay increase, the taxes and health surcharge paid by visa applicants from all over the world, including Indians, will “significantly” increase, according to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Sunak confirmed a general increase of between 5 and 7 percent. He emphasised that this, however, would not be addressed with increased government borrowing out of concern for further igniting high inflation, and that the costs would have to be found somewhere else.
Sunak told reporters at a Downing Street press conference: “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 people’s taxes up and I don’t think it would be responsible or right to borrow more because that would just make inflation worse.”
“So, to find this money, we’ve done two things. The first is that we will raise the fees we charge foreign nationals who enter this country for visas and for something known as the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS), which is a fee they must pay to use the NHS’, he said.
“All of those fees are going to increase, and that will raise more than GBP 1 billion,” he continued. “Therefore, visa application fees will increase significantly across the board, and similarly for the IHS.”
Sunak emphasised that this was “entirely right” because the fees had not previously been raised and because the government thought it was necessary given that the costs had increased since the previous increase.
The second measure is to ask government agencies to “reprioritise” in order to reduce the nation’s rising salary expense. He stressed that this would not entail service and job layoffs but rather a shift in priorities.
The IHS, which is charged to long-term immigrants to the UK and has a reduced rate for students, ranges from about GBP 470 for a year to thousands of GBP for applications for multiple-year visas.
The UK Home Office is anticipated to announce all the specifics of which visa categories will see increases and when the new, higher rates will go into effect in the upcoming months.
Source- travel biz