UK Immigration News

The UK's Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) has advised the government that the country requires high levels of immigration to help grow the economy. It says that young migrants who come to the UK as skilled workers will have the greatest beneficial effect on the national accounts.

A leading UK lifestyle management company has said that it may have to move parts of its operations overseas because it has become so difficult to bring in skilled staff with Tier 2 (General) skilled worker visas.

Alex Cheatle, the founder of Ten Group, told the Financial Times 'If you cannot recruit managers for a team here, you have to shift the entire department offshore'. He continued 'I am very passionate about being a British-based business but it becomes much more difficult to sustain that when you have got a global company'.

A UK education body has called on the UK's Home Office to stop changing in the rules for Tier 4 sponsors. The Higher Education Better Regulation Group (HEBRG) says that the UK's Home Office has created uncertainty among colleges and universities and says that this lack of clarity has cost them about £67m in administration costs in 2012-13 alone.

The total number of cases in the UK's immigration backlog rose by 190,000 in the last three months of 2012 to over 502,000 cases according to the House of Commons' Home Affairs Committee (HAC).

The figure, the HAC says, includes all outstanding immigration cases. It said that the rise was accounted for not by a sudden rash of new applications but because the new acting head of immigration at the Home Office, Sarah Rapson, had told MPs about a new collection of cases known as the 'temporary and permanent migration pool' in June.

Right wing Conservative MP Liam Fox has called for radical reform of the UK's immigration system in favour of skilled workers at the expense of family members of UK citizens.

Dr Fox, who was forced to resign as the Minister of Defence in 2011 after allegations of impropriety, has spent the last two years writing a book about his political vision. His proposals relating to immigration are perhaps lacking in detail.

Mark Harper, the UK Immigration Minister, has said that it is 'a misconception' that Chinese visitors to the UK 'have a hard time getting a UK visa and it's time to stop knocking the system'.