Family Visas: Income Requirement

Simon Opher Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dr Simon Opher (Stroud) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for introducing this debate. I would also like to thank the more than 300 petitioners from Stroud who have made this debate possible, and the Petitions Committee for allocating parliamentary time to this crucial debate.

As we have heard, the previous Conservative Government hiked the minimum income requirement to £29,000, and were seeking to raise it even further, to £38,000, all under the guise of controlling immigration. That does not seem to have worked, but let us be clear about this policy and what it has actually achieved: it has torn families apart and inflicted hardship on ordinary people. So I welcomed my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary commissioning the Migration Advisory Committee to conduct a review of this area as soon as we entered government.

In November, I, with 25 of my colleagues, wrote to the Migration Advisory Committee calling for the family visa income requirement to be lowered to the equivalent of the full-time national living wage. That adjustment would enable thousands of families to reunite, while still supporting financial stability; it would be a compassionate shift away from the previous Government’s harsh stance. I am hopeful that the committee will come to the same conclusion.

Some people have sought to misrepresent the truth about this matter when discussing immigration. It is our duty to bring the facts to this debate. In 2024, the UK issued 3.4 million visas; 87,000 were family visas, which accounted for 7%, and the spousal visas made up even less—less than 5%. Moreover, the narrative that foreign spouses are a burden to taxpayers is fundamentally misleading. The Home Office’s own guidelines explicitly state that foreign spouses have no recourse to public funds. In fact, they contribute through taxation, national insurance and an annual immigration health surcharge of £1,035.

I also worry that the cost of enforcing this policy is greater than the financial benefits. As we have heard, families forced into single-parent situations often require more Government support. As a GP, I have been seeing a patient and their family; the children are suffering because they cannot live with both parents, which has caused a lot of mental health difficulties. This policy is not only inhumane, but economically flawed.

This debate is not just about numbers on a spreadsheet and arbitrary thresholds; it is about real human lives and love, and the human cost is immeasurable. I will highlight the case of one of my constituents, Rebecca Gray, who played a pivotal role in securing the debate by rallying her social media followers to help to get this petition over the 100,000-signature line.

In 2023, Rebecca and her husband married in Turkey and began the spouse visa application process, knowing they had to meet a savings requirement of £88,500. To achieve that, they both worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week, while living in a high-risk earthquake zone in Turkey. Despite losing 250 extended family members in the February 2023 earthquake, Rebecca persevered, but because of the UK’s rigid financial rules, they remain separated, with no certainty about when they can reunite. The cost of applying for a spouse visa is now a staggering £14,256 and increasing regularly. Rebecca is essentially exiled from her own country because she does not meet an arbitrary financial threshold.

Rebecca’s case highlights further issues with the present policy. Rebecca is having to go through the cash savings route, which means she must hold £88,500 in savings. The average 25 to 34-year-old in the UK holds about £3,500 in savings. That just goes to show that the £88,000 figure is absolutely ludicrous.

The current policy means that family reunification is a luxury; as we have heard, it is only for the very richest. The £29,000 minimum income threshold is already the highest in the world, and 75% of applicants would not be able to meet the even greater figure of £38,700 proposed by the previous Government. It is deeply unjust that many British citizens working in our NHS, our police forces and other key public services now earn too little to live with their spouse in the UK. This is a matter of basic fairness. Families belong together. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister, when the review is published, to commit to a policy that will keep families together.

--- Later in debate ---

[Katie Lam]

As I just explained, if the person has been here for five years and applies for indefinite leave to remain, and it is granted—as almost all indefinite leave to remain applications are—they are entitled to full welfare, social housing, NHS care and everything else the state provides to its citizens.

That point about indefinite leave to remain is especially relevant to family visas. Ten years after arrival, only 7%, or one in 14, of those who come here on student visas, and 21%, or one in five, of those who came on work visas, have ILR. For family visas, it is 83%, or five out of every six people. That is why the Migration Advisory Committee’s initial impact assessment of the policy found £500 million in welfare cost savings and £500 million more in public service savings from the introduction of the £18,000 minimum income requirement, and that was when far fewer people were using that route to come here.

But the cost-benefit analysis that counts is not that of the Migration Advisory Committee, but that of the British people. They want mass migration to end, and they are sick of broken promises. The numbers must come down across the whole system. The last Government were therefore right to introduce this reform, and it does not bode well that this Prime Minister, for all his talk, decided at the first opportunity to back out of it.

[Dr Opher]

Will the hon. Lady say whether the policy of punitively attacking families was successful in reducing migration? Will she also say what effect immigration has on GDP?

[Katie Lam]

As I have said, the policy was nothing like enough to reduce immigration. It was a step in the right direction, but it was deeply insufficient. Migration has the effect of increasing GDP in raw terms because more people are here but, on GDP per capita, most evidence indicates that it weakens our economy over the medium term.

On this reform and the many others required to our migration system, the Government must make difficult decisions. Those decisions may be painful, especially in the short term, for individual people, families or businesses, or the cost of the public service workforce. But that is the only way for any Government’s actions to match their words. The public have had enough.

Can the Minister confirm that the Government remain fully committed to bringing down migration? Can she confirm exactly what that means, by how much they will bring down the numbers and when, and that the Government understand that it must happen—indeed, can only happen—where it involves making hard and upsetting choices for the good of our country? With that in mind, can the Minister confirm whether it is the Government’s intention to maintain this policy? If they will not make that commitment today, can they at least commit to the fundamental principle behind it—that those who come here, or bring others here, should be able to support themselves financially and not represent a net cost to the state over the long term? Does the Minister therefore agree that the salary threshold should increase to whatever level is necessary to ensure that that is the case?

Finally, I am conscious that those who have been granted indefinite leave to remain are then able to sponsor a spouse. Can the Minister tell us how many migrants on skilled worker visas, care worker visas and shortage occupation lists—I believe that amounts to 2 million visas since the start of 2021—the Home Office expects to apply for ILR when eligible? How many spousal visa applications does the Department then expect to receive from those people? Further, based on demographic, level of income and number of dependants, what do the Government expect that to cost? What discussions are being held between the Home Secretary, the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions on how these pressures will be met?