Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of the visa brake on applicants who have been long-term residents in third countries.

By year ending September 2025, asylum claims along the affected routes by nationals of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar, and Sudan had risen to over 470% of their 2021 level. The visa brake operates on a nationality-based approach on the Student visa route for Sudan and three other nationalities. This is in order to safeguard the fairness, credibility and sustainability of the immigration system as a whole, and so we are unable provide an exception to individuals who are resident in third countries.

While the terms and conditions of the Chevening Scholarship require scholars to return home for at least two years following the completion of courses, there have been instances of asylum claims made by Chevening scholars for each of the affected nationalities in recent years. Given this continued asylum risk, introducing exceptions from the visa brakes for Chevening scholars of these nationalities would be unfair

The brake will be kept under regular review. The visa brake is not intended to be permanent, but it will only be released once the government considers it appropriate to do so.