A TORY government scheme designed to attract Nobel prize winners and other global experts to live and work in the UK has not received a single applicant, it has been revealed.
The scheme, a facet of the Home Office’s “Global Talent” visa route, was officially launched in May.
At the time, Home Secretary Priti Patel said the visa scheme would bring the “best and brightest” to the UK.
It allows winners of around 70 different prestigious awards across science, engineering, humanities, or medicine to make a single visa application and circumvent the need to win approval from one of six endorsing bodies.
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Patel previously commented: “Winners of these awards have reached the pinnacle of their career and they have so much to offer the UK. These important changes will give them the freedom to come and work in our world leading arts, sciences, music, and film industries as we build back better.”
However, a freedom of information (FOI) request from The New Scientist found that not one person had applied to use this visa route since its inception.
The FOI request focused on science, engineering, humanities, and medicine. There are further awards which mean a person becomes eligible to use this visa route, in categories such as music, film and TV, and literature.
The visa route is open to people who have won prestigious awards in these areas including Oscars, Mobos, Tony Awards, and Golden Globes.
It has not been disclosed how many applications the Home Office has received from people in these other categories.
Sir Andre Geim (above left), a Nobel prize-winning scientist from the University of Manchester, said the scheme was a “joke”.
“Chances that a single Nobel or Turing laureate would move to the UK to work are zero for the next decade or so,” he told The New Scientist, adding: “The government thinks if you pump up UK science with a verbal diarrhea of optimism – it can somehow become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Christopher Jackson, another academic from the University of Manchester, told the magazine that the scheme was inherently biased from the outset.
Jackson said: “How we measure excellence is very nebulous. These awards favour certain people – those who are white, male, heterosexual, cis-gendered – and reward them based on their privilege.”
Just 22 women have been given Nobel prizes in the science categories since the award was created. No black person has ever won a science Nobel.
A Home Office spokesperson said the visa route for which no-one has yet applied is “just one option under our Global Talent route, through which we have received thousands of applications since its launch in February 2020 and this continues to rise”.
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