Family Visas: Income Requirement

Laurence Turner Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Laurence Turner (Birmingham Northfield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Pritchard. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) on her very capable speech introducing the debate.

I speak today in recognition of the strength of the representations that I have received from constituents; I thank all those who took the time to write to me ahead of this debate. I accept—as, I think, all my constituents do —that all Governments face the challenge of striking the right balance between a fair and rules-based immigration system and the human right to respect for family life, but we are here today because the 2012 system does not strike the right balance. The results can be arbitrary, unfair and distressing for families.

As has been said, family life and love cannot be neatly divided by borders. The House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee report said that the family visa system can be “complex and inconsistent”, and drew attention to the processing delays and decisions that are sometimes very hard for constituents to understand, as other hon. Members have ably highlighted.

There are a number of examples of unfairness in the policies and practices that this Government have inherited. The inflexibility of the cut-off takes no account of variations in earnings across the country. There is affluence in my constituency, but by and large wages are low and we have not fully recovered from the closure of the Longbridge plant 20 years ago. In a ranking of all constituencies by average income, Birmingham Northfield is 35th from the bottom.

In my constituency, the average full-time employee’s salary is about £31,000, but that does not take account of the self-employed, whose earnings tend to be lower. That figure is almost £3,000 lower than in Birmingham as a whole, almost £4,000 lower than in the west midlands overall and more than £6,000, or 16%, lower than the average for the UK. More than half of people in work are below the current threshold, and that would rise to more than 70% under the former Government’s plans.

The £29,000 threshold is already an extremely challenging barrier for many families to meet because the jobs are just not available. I have constituents who work two or more jobs in an effort to meet that threshold, at great personal cost. There is a clear risk that if the inherited plans proceed, the right to respect for family life will become the preserve of a fortunate few, concentrated in just a few neighbourhoods within the city of Birmingham.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) made the point well: the previous Government confused income with skill. It has been the stated ambition of successive Governments to attract highly skilled migrant workers. Two of the constituents who contacted me today hold doctorates, including in shortage occupation areas, but, due to a combination of altruism in their choice of career and family circumstances, they do not have large incomes. One of them, Dr Gillian Thies, is in the Public Gallery. She fought for years for her husband, Patrick, who is also with us, and their children to be allowed to join the rest of the family in Birmingham. The applications were initially refused and were granted only in 2018, after significant political and press attention.

Patrick is now a senior physician associate at the Royal Orthopaedic hospital, and his application was strongly supported by the NHS. Indeed, his work in the UK is of ongoing benefit to patients and the wider community, but Gillian and he had to fight to bring their children to the UK from America; distressingly, their adopted children—two young teenagers—were turned around and put on a plane at Heathrow. They are now heavily involved in the Reunite Families UK campaign. I want to place on the record an appreciation of how they have responded to their ordeal: by working to benefit others who find themselves in comparable situations today.

Gillian and Patrick are not alone in Northfield. Another of my constituents estimates that he has spent £50,000 to try to resolve his wife’s case, which he says is an exceptionally generous subsidy to airlines, hotels and lawyers. Would it not be better for the economy if that money could be spent in south Birmingham instead?

I welcome the Government’s decision to ask the Migration Advisory Committee to look again at this policy. I hope that the review, and the Government’s response to it, will take account of the House of Lords Committee’s recommendation that the financial requirement should be revisited to become more flexible and to focus on the likelihood of the future income of the family unit, rather than solely on the sponsor’s past income. The review should also take wider account of a family’s whole circumstances and of the differences in labour markets and local wages, and focus on improving the administration of applications so that fewer families are left in limbo for so long and the system is ultimately fairer and more compassionate.