The United Kingdom says it will hike visa application fees for immigrants to meet its public sector wage increase.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a rise in the price of visas and the health surcharge paid by immigrants in the United Kingdom.
“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 up people’s taxes and I don’t think it would be responsible or right to borrow more because that would just make inflation worse,” Sunak told reporters at Downing Street.
“So, what we have done are two things to find this money. The first is, we are going to increase the charges that we have for migrants who are coming to this country when they apply for visas and indeed something called the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS), which is the levy that they pay to access the National Health Service (NHS),” he said.
“All of those fees are going to go up and that will raise over £1 billion (Rs 10,770 crore), so across the board visa application fees are going to go up significantly and similarly for the IHS, he added.
How are the govt going to fund paying public sector workers more?
'The fee for migrants applying for visas and accessing the NHS will go up – that will raise over £1bn,' Rishi Sunak explains.
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