Family visa earnings threshold will not be imposed in full until 2025 – Sunak

The Prime Minister said the minimum salary requirement would still be raised to £38,700, but that the increase would be “phased” in over the next year, despite anger from right-wing Tory MPs about the rowback.

The Government on Thursday quietly announced the threshold would first be increased to £29,000 in the spring, and then taken up in “incremental stages”, without setting out a timetable.

Mr Sunak told broadcasters on Friday: “We’re increasing the salary threshold significantly, and we’re doing it exactly as we said we were doing it, we’re just doing it in two stages.

“So we’ll go up in a few months’ time and then it will go up again the full amount in early 2025. So it’s exactly what we said we’re doing, just phasing it over the next year or so.”

The climbdown has angered hard-line Conservative MPs in favour of tighter migration controls.

David Jones, deputy chairman of the right-wing European Research Group, told the PA news agency on Friday: “The Government should have stuck to its guns. Yesterday’s decision was a regrettable sign of weakness, made worse by the fact that Parliament was not sitting and therefore was unable to interrogate ministers on the reasons for the decision.”

A source close to former immigration minister Robert Jenrick said the package “needs to be implemented now, not long-grassed to the spring or watered down” while Jonathan Gullis, a Conservative former minister, said the decision “undermines our efforts”.

Former minister Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Common Sense Group of Tory MPs, told the BBC the earnings threshold should rise to £38,700 “quickly” to give people “certainty”.

Home Secretary James Cleverly had announced in early December the sharp increase from £18,600 to £38,700 as part of a raft of measures after Office for National Statistics figures put net migration in 2022 at a record of 745,000.

But the move was criticised for threatening to tear families apart, with many having their future thrown into doubt as the Government considered the details of the policy.

The revised policy, announced in answer to a written parliamentary question by Home Office minister Lord Sharpe of Epsom, said the earnings threshold would be “increased in incremental stages to give predictability”.

This would begin in spring, with the increase to £29,000, rising to £38,700 “in the final stage of implementation”.

The Prime Minister previously told MPs the Government was looking at “transitional arrangements” for changes to the thresholds to make sure they are “fair”.

Downing Street had already rowed back on its position on whether the new minimum income rule would apply when existing visas come up for renewal, initially saying they would but then suggesting just days later that had not been decided.

Mr Cleverly insisted the plans would still reduce net legal migration by 300,000 people a year.

But a Government adviser recently said even the initial proposal to raise the threshold to £38,700 would have a minimal impact on immigration numbers.

Professor Brian Bell, chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee, said earlier this month that the number of visas in question was “not that big” and was “dwarfed” by student and skilled worker visas.

Requiring many Britons to have a salary of £38,700 – above the national median gross annual salary of £34,963 – to bring over their foreign spouses was only expected to cut numbers by the low tens of thousands.

In a letter to MPs on Thursday, new Home Office minister Tom Pursglove said the changes would be introduced in a “stepped fashion throughout early 2024,” insisting this “strikes the right balance” between reducing numbers and giving those affected time to prepare.

Opposition parties said the policy was in “chaos”.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said ministers “failed to consult anyone on their new proposals and took no account of the impact of steep spousal visa changes on families next year, so it’s no surprise they are now rowing back in a rush”.

The Liberal Democrats suggested the planned £38,700 threshold had always been “unworkable”, with the party’s home affairs spokesman Alistair Carmichael branding it “yet another half-thought-through idea to placate the hardliners on their own back benches.”