We are writing this as some of the 170,000 people living in the UK, who are on the ten year route to settlement. We have legal status in the UK either because we have family here or because we’ve spent a very long time in this country. To keep our legal status we have to renew our visas every 2.5 years, each time paying eye-watering fees.
Recently the government announced that to pay the public sector pay deal it had decided to increase our visa fees by 20% and the Immigration Health Surcharge by 66%. For us on the ten year route it means the cost of one application for one adult’s leave to remain will go up from £2,608 to at least £3,845.50. Over all ten years, to settle in the UK will cost one adult £18,265 – an increase of over £5,000.*
The government say this visa extortion will fund part of their public sector pay offer.
We say, we will not sit back and be exploited in order to clean up this government’s mess.
Doctors, nurses, teachers all need and deserve a pay rise. We stand in solidarity with them. But the government’s plans to pay for it from our visa fees only pits us against each other – working people, colleagues and neighbours.
Let’s be clear:
We are not newly arrived – most of us have already been in the UK for over a decade. Some of us have lived here since we were children. Our futures are here and we are part of our communities.
When you get status on the 10 year route, sometimes it feels like an opportunity you should be grateful for – like you’re saved from being undocumented, your life should become easier. For a lot of us getting status should be comfort for us. But the way that we live is actually in great discomfort. The 10 year route sounds like a path to becoming a citizen, but actually it’s a journey of discomfort and being forced into debt. This will make it worse.
The visa fee hikes affect not just us but our children and their futures – many of us are mums raising children who were born in the UK and are British citizens.
What you don’t see within the law and the government’s plans is what we experience internally – within our families, within ourselves. The mental health effect it has on us. Even things that should make the route easier create more complications. The newer rule that the route can be reduced to five years if you’ve been here for half of your life can cause separation and guilt within families. In the regulations it shows the family as one unit but the reality of the rules separate us.
We already have to work harder to afford the bare minimum – saving for our visa fees on top of paying taxes, our rent and bills in a cost of living crisis.
The Home Office says the route gives people financial independence – but that’s not the reality.
One group member applied for a job recently but faced discrimination based on her status: her visa is about to run out so they wouldn’t employ her. Equally, because the renewals every two and a half years are always delayed by the Home Office – sometimes for up to a year – people lose jobs and opportunities during that time. There’s no security on the route. You are always on edge, you never know when they’re going to ask for more documentation.
Many of us also have no recourse to public funds – no access to the public safety net.
You get status but it’s like you’re punished for it. You feel grateful you finally have this opportunity to work but you have to work so hard to pay back your debts. We do not have benefits to fall back on if we can’t work. We save and save for our visa fees – thousands of which are already pure profit for the Home Office. And now they want more.
And we are public sector workers!
A report published earlier this year by GMIAU, IPPR and Praxis, found a quarter (24%) of people surveyed on the 10 year route work in care or nursing roles. Should we pay more visa fees in order to pay ourselves and our colleagues fairly.
This is why we are angry to see the government try to further exploit us, profiting off our hard work while making our position in the UK feel less secure.
We are already struggling on the ten year route – facing debt, homelessness and poverty. The government can and should pay workers fairly without making life more difficult and less secure for people who are already so affected by the cost of living crisis, who are already paying taxes to fund public services, who already pay the double tax Immigration Health Surcharge and some of the most expensive visa fees in Europe.
We are not the government’s cash machine – we may be broke, but we are not broken and we demand the government does the right thing – pay our public sector workers fairly and make a U-turn on the visa fees exploitation.
*Estimate made at the time of this statement in July 2023. Please check our Information page for updated information on current fees.