Immigration and Nationality (Fees) (Amendment) Order 2025

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

It is a brave Minister who continues without his Whip.

I was trying to explain why fees such as the ETA fee must be looked at in the context of the possible impact on tourism. The example I was giving to illustrate it relates to the system that we had until recently, whereby an ETA fee was charged for people who were travelling from a third country through the UK in transit to somewhere else, using Heathrow and Manchester in particular. We as a committee were concerned about that and thought that it would have an impact on tourism; that was backed up when the ETA was introduced initially for a few Gulf countries. As a result of that introduction, Heathrow Airport alone recorded a reduction of 122,000 people transiting through Heathrow from those relatively small countries. That was when the fee was at £10; if it is to go to £16, you can see the impact that it will have on people—not for transit but for people thinking of coming here. There is real, clear evidence that this fee increase being proposed, from £10 to £16, could have a huge impact on tourism.

Of course, our committee expressed a particular concern in relation to these fees in terms of tourism in Northern Ireland and issues in relation to the common travel area between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. This issue was picked up in the 16th report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which said:

“We asked the Home Office for any assessments it has made about ETAs to date, especially in relation to Northern Ireland (NI). The Home Office stated that as a result of its monitoring … it was working with a range of government and tourist bodies to ensure that ‘ETAs are not seen as a barrier to cross-border tourism on the island of Ireland’”.


I ask the Minister the very question that the committee suggested, which is

“whether (or when) firmer evidence can be made available on the practical impact of the ETA on”

Northern Ireland tourism. If the Minister has any information, clearly, that would be very helpful. More generally, given that the Minister said that this SI has been introduced following a review of all these fees, can he tell us whether the issue of tourism was taken into account? In particular, can he give a categorical assurance that, when the new SI comes forward—the one that will actually make the increase to the new maximum—the impact assessment will take account of tourism?

I said that Robert Jenrick, when he announced the whole scheme, made two points. His second point was that the £10 charge

“will ensure that the Department’s costs in delivering the scheme are effectively covered across a range of volume scenarios”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/6/23; col. 44WS.]

Can the Minister, whose department has conducted this review, tell us whether the increase that is being proposed is as a result of evidence that the £10 is insufficient to cover the costs of the operation of ETA; or whether this is in fact just a way of making additional money for the Exchequer? I am sure that he will be able to answer that and will have the figures to back it up.

I just say to the Minister that, given that we see in the notes for this particular SI that the longer-term effect is to bring £260 million-odd into the Exchequer, I suspect that the fee increase for ETA is about adding to that. However, I also warn him that, if tourism is seriously affected in the way I have suggested, the Government will not be able to make that amount of money.

My final point is about the ease of operating the ETA system. If it is difficult to operate, that will put people off bothering and it will stop people even thinking of coming to this country as tourists and perhaps also for business sessions, and so on. When we looked at the ETA introduction, we were concerned about the lack of different languages in which the information about ETA was being provided. The then Government actually agreed with us and accepted that official information relating to ETA should be made available in a wider number of languages “as soon as possible”, including French, German and Spanish. So can the noble Lord tell us whether this has happened?

I should tell him that, prior to this meeting, I sought to find out for myself whether I could get details of how ETA operates in other languages. I could not. So I asked our good friends in the Library whether they could find out, and they told me that they too could not find any evidence that information is provided in any language other than English. They pointed out to me that, of course, some platforms have a translate option—that might be the clever way out—but, when we checked some of the platforms, we could not get the ETA to translate into different languages. So the evidence I have shows that what was promised has not been done. Of course, it may have an impact on people choosing to come to this country if they find it hard to get this information. So perhaps the Minister can address this.

There are many other issues with the ETA operation which are not relevant to the SI, so I will not raise them now, but the Committee and the Justice and Home Affairs Committee are very keen to have an opportunity to discuss those issues with the Minister. However, in the meantime, on this SI and the proposed future SI, I very much look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Foster, who raised serious questions about the ETA and whether there will be an impact. He provided evidence to show that having an ETA at the current level, before any increases, is already having an impact. One of the general themes I will cover is what the impact assessment does not say about the impact on businesses, including tourism in this case, and other areas that I will come to. This is yet another charge that has gone up, adding to overheads, and it is becoming a problem in certain sectors.

It is also a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rowlands, who outlined many of the problems that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has been reporting on over the years. I look forward to the Minister’s response to his questions.

I will start on an optimistic note, given our debate on the previous SI. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee does not often hand out commendations in its reports, but it has commended the Minister and his officials on the Explanatory Memorandum, which was very helpful. With my calculator out, I did a lot of calculations and, although Minister may be irritated by some of the questions he gets, it is actually because we understand what is happening. That needs to be to be credited because we have not necessarily been able to give that credit in the past. The impact assessment was helpful, but I am not sure that it asked the right people about the impact. I will come back to that in a second.

Paragraph 29 of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s 16th report says that

“the net benefit of the changes is relatively small. Further, we note that in some scenarios set out in”

the impact assessment,

“the costs of the changes outweigh the benefits. This possibility arises because … it is ‘highly uncertain’ what goods and services visitors and visa-holders consume, and how many of those are provided”

by British businesses. Can the Minister comment further on this, or is the impact assessment just guesswork? That is the perhaps slightly unfair approach to trying to translate what the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee said.

I say that because the maxima level set here is, pretty broadly, a 7% increase. I very much echo the comments made by my noble friend; the Government have made it very plain that when they do introduce fee rises—as opposed to setting a new maxima—most of them will go up to the new maxima. As the impact assessment says, the Government are trying to ensure that they can cover the costs of migration and the staffing for that, but I am concerned because 7% seems high.

For example, the pension triple lock is increasing by 4% this year. Many felt that was too high in the current financial circumstances. I am not going to comment on that but am trying to weigh it up as 7% seems to be a general increase, if not for the next year. I know the Minister will say it is only a maxima, but we heard elsewhere that there is an intention in most cases to go to that.

It is true that in paragraph 5.2, the EM says:

“The department is seeking to implement changes to fees to generate additional income from end users to support the funding of the migration and borders system and reduce reliance on funding from the taxpayer”.


However, the increases that are not 7% are the ones that really worry me. They seem bizarre and, in one particular case, ill thought through. For example, the skilled worker and temporary worker fees have both been increased by over 100%: from £239 to a £525 maxima for the skilled worker fee and from £25 to £55 for the temporary worker maxima. The reality is that in just over seven months, this Government have increased other costs to businesses—not Home Office costs, I grant you—but it is difficult and tedious for employers to recruit staff from overseas at the moment. I am not commenting on whether it was right or wrong, but the previous Government really tightened down on who could come to work here. Part of that was to start increasing substantially the costs that businesses and individuals coming here had to pay.

One of the costs I am particularly concerned about—we have just had a vote on this and there will be more before the evening is done—is on the increase to employers’ national insurance contributions. Not only are these increasing, but the floor for payment is lowered to include many lower-paid workers. Migrant workers filling gaps in our economy, such as in social care, hospices, agriculture and hospitality, are much more likely to be in those sectors where the margins for businesses are extremely low.

Our social care sector is already in complete crisis. Only today, there are reports of care at home being removed and clients being told they will have to leave their home and move into care homes, solely because of the economics of the increased national insurance contributions and the high costs associated with care delivered in a home setting. To have extra fees for migrant workers—often paid for by the businesses because the migrant workers just do not have their own resources—is going to add further to those sectoral problems. I wonder why the impact assessment says there are no financial implications from a 100% increase in these fees.

If these increases are as set out in paragraph 5.2 of the EM, did the Home Office actually seek advice from some of the sectors most reliant on overseas workers, whether skilled or temporary? I am slightly less worried about the very high-value skilled workers, where an employer will not only take on somebody at a high salary but be prepared to manage an oncost. It is those who are given temporary leave to work here, or in the health sector, where we know they have been granted.

Finally, paragraph 5.10 sets out the increase for the review of a decision related to immigration and nationality. The main fee maxima is increased by 7% and I have already commented on that. Hidden a few lines further down is a really shocking increase from £80 to £480 for an administrative review of a decision. This is nothing to do with the relevance of costs and I wonder if it is a financial punishment. An administrative review is very different to a review by a panel or senior officer, as referred to earlier in that section. Can the Minister explain why this particular administrative review has now hit the same maxima level as the much more complex and personnel-intensive level required under the main type of panel review?

By the way, it is interesting to note that, at paragraph 11.1, that particular increase has not been highlighted, whereas others have. I wonder why that might happen. The reason why the noble Lord, Lord Rowlands, my noble friend Lord Foster and I are raising these issues is to try to understand the strategy behind these increases, as opposed to just a reason to raise money. We are concerned that at least some of them may backfire and stop the increase in growth that this Government are keen to see.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

There will be an impact assessment. I still say to the noble Lord that people want to come to London: they want to see this building and Buckingham Palace; they want to see Downing Street and Trafalgar Square. In my home city of Liverpool, people want to see Beatles-related material or they go for football matches. People will go to York because of its history. People go to Scotland—the noble Lord’s home base—because they like Edinburgh and Scottish culture. That is not going to change because we have gone from £10 to £16. There might be other factors that stop people coming but I am not convinced that that figure will be looked at. I reassure the noble Lord that if the figure goes at a future date from £10 up to the maximum of £16 on that proposal, there will be an impact assessment and he can test it. He can vote for or against it in due course.

The noble Lord made another important point on the ETA form and I am grateful to him for raising it. I want to get the bottom of the source of his knowledge about potential translations—I will do this, if I may, outside the Grand Committee. I will look at it and write back to him in due course. At the moment, the form is available only in English. It has been launched in the Gulf countries. We have had no significant feedback, but I will take that point away. If there were assurances given previously by Ministers or officials, I want to get to the bottom of them. I am not aware of them from the discussions that we had today or from my discussions with officials in the Home Office. We will look at that in due course.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, talked about the logic for all of this. The logic is that we have to fund the cost of the migration system. The logic is that if there are fee-level increases—which are not yet on the table, but could come—with impact assessments, these will be to ensure that we maximise the income to cover the cost of administration and of border systems generally. There may also be some businesses that ask, “Can I recruit home-grown employment?”. That is an important consequence as well.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am grateful for the Minister’s response. I am mindful that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee said that some of the increases in the maxima might not cover the administrative costs of introducing them. That then starts to be a burden on the Home Office’s budget, so is analysis being done to look at that? It will otherwise become counter- productive.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The driver for some of these issues is to ensure that we have self-sufficiency on costs for this area. Obviously, I am talking today about the potential for maximas. We are not talking about what those fees are going to be. They may be the maximas and they may not. The Home Office will take that decision and it will lie predominantly with Ministers who are Members of the House of Commons, rather than of the House of Lords—such as myself. We will discuss those fee increases. That is a decision taken by the Minister for Migration and Borders, who is a Member of the House of Commons in the Home Office team. We will look at that and these orders will come forward to both Houses in due course. I will take feedback and discussion, as I am doing now with colleagues in this House.

The general principle of this is that we ensure that we raise that resource and potentially look at challenging behaviour so that we give opportunities for people to say, “If it costs X to bring someone from Y country, are those skills available locally to boost the economy locally?” That is a perfectly legitimate policy objective that I think was shared by the last Government and which is not difficult for Members to accept and understand.

I hope that I am covering all the points. The final point that I want to make is on Northern Ireland. Citizens of the UK, including citizens who live in Northern Ireland—whether they identify as Irish or British—will not have an ETA to go to Ireland, and, vice-versa, Irish citizens will not need an ETA to go to Northern Ireland. There will be tourist movement from other countries into Ireland and Northern Ireland, and potentially into the United Kingdom as a whole through that route. I am cognisant of that and we are aware of it. We will make an assessment on that. Again, I repeat my record that says that we have not yet made the decisions on the figures. We have not brought those forward or made the impact assessment but when we do, I will be ensuring with colleagues that that impact on Northern Ireland tourism is assessed, as will be the impact of the collectability of that ETA in relation to the island of Ireland and the common travel area.

I am grateful to noble Lords who have raised that issue but it is something on which we have worked closely with the Northern Ireland Executive and the Irish Government since the inception of the ETA policy. We will continue to work with those partners to understand the impact of ETAs in Northern Ireland. By requiring an ETA on crossing the land border, we will also have a better understanding of those who are seeking to come to the United Kingdom. However, as noble Lords, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Foster, will know, the land border issue in Northern Ireland is sensitive and not one that we wish to see imposed—as it was, even in the times when I was a Northern Ireland Minister 20 years ago.

With that, I hope that I have answered the points made. I commend this order to the Grand Committee.