According to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, fees and health surcharges paid by visa applicants from all over the world, including Indians, to the UK’s publicly financed National Health Service (NHS), will increase “significantly” to cover the nation’s public sector salary hike.
The British Indian leader, who was under pressure to accept the findings of an independent study of compensation for teachers, police officers, junior physicians, and other public sector employees, confirmed an increase of between 5 and 7% across the board.
He emphasised that this, however, would not be met with increased government borrowing out of concern about further igniting high inflation, and that the costs would have to be found somewhere else.
“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 a Downing Street press conference.
“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,” he said.
“All of those fees are going to go up and that will raise over GBP 1 billion, so across the board visa application fees are going to go up significantly and similarly for the IHS,” he added.
Sunak emphasised that this was “entirely right” because the fees had not previously been raised and because the government thought it was necessary given that the costs had increased since the previous increase.
The second measure is to ask government agencies to “reprioritise” in order to reduce the nation’s rising salary expense.
He stressed that this would not entail service and job layoffs but rather a shift in priorities.
The IHS, which is charged to long-term immigrants to the UK and has a reduced rate for students, ranges from about GBP 470 for a year to thousands of GBP for applications for multiple-year visas.
The UK Home Office is anticipated to announce all the specifics of which visa categories will see increases and when the new, higher rates will go into effect in the upcoming months.
The Sunak-led Conservative Party government has come under a lot of strain as a result of disagreements over public sector pay that have resulted in a number of strikes over the past year that have negatively impacted schools and hospitals.
Junior physicians in England started a new five-day protest on Thursday after having their demands for a 35% salary increase denied.
Mr. Sunak stated in his wage announcement that his offer was “final” and that additional industrial action would not change his mind.
“There will be no more talks on pay. We will not negotiate again on this year’s settlements and no amount of strikes will change our decision. Instead, the settlement we’ve reached today gives us a fair way to end the strikes. A fair deal for workers and a fair deal for the British taxpayer,” he declared.