UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced a substantial increase in the surcharge paid by visa applicants worldwide for the state-funded National Health Service (NHS).
Speaking during a press conference at Downing Street on Thursday, Sunak revealed that migrants would also face higher fees for visa applications.
This development is expected to have a significant impact on Nigeria, which has one of the highest numbers of migrants to the UK. Sunak, who is of British-Indian descent, was under pressure to accept the recommendation of an independent review on the remuneration of teachers, police, junior doctors, and other public sector workers.
He confirmed a uniform increase ranging from 5 percent to 7 percent across all sectors.
“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 said.
“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 NHS.
“All of those fees are going to go up and that will raise over £1 billion. So, across the board visa application fees are going to go up significantly and similarly for the IHS.
Sunak added that this was “entirely right” as these fees have not been increased recently.
He said the government believes it is appropriate given that the costs have risen since the last hike.
According to Sunak, this move will have no effect on inflation because there would be no new borrowing or spending to fund the increases.
He added that the funds would have to be sourced elsewhere.
“Teachers’ pay rises would be funded by a reallocation of the existing department budget, ” he said.