International researchers eye UK exit over health surcharge hikes

Early career researchers are already considering leaving the UK over “excessive” and “unfair” increases to health surcharges and visa fees due to be confirmed this autumn, scientists have warned.

Under plans announced by Rishi Sunak in July, the annual immigration health surcharge will increase from £624 to £1,035 for main applicants, and to £776 for child dependants from this autumn, while visa fees will rise by 15 per cent.

At present, the total cost for an international researcher applying for a five-year visa, who is bringing a partner and two children, is £15,880, according to Universities UK (UUK), of which £10,940 relates to the immigration health surcharge (IHS).

That would increase to £23,791 following autumn’s price hikes, and £18,110 for the health surcharge alone when Mr Sunak’s plans are enacted – equating to about £4,700 a year, or about 14 per cent of the pre-tax annual salary of a postdoc on £35,000.

The increases, which will be used to fund a 7 per cent pay rise for millions of public sector workers, are likely to “severely test” the government’s ambition of attracting overseas researchers and innovators, UUK has warned. Others claim the hikes will undermine Britain’s plan, announced in its 2021 R&D strategy, to recruit an additional 150,000 researchers and technicians by 2030.

Robert Insall, professor of mathematical and computational cell biology at the University of Glasgow, said awareness of the additional costs imposed on international researchers was starting to deter scientific talent from coming to the UK.

“People are writing to me saying ‘why should I send my best postdocs to the UK’ when they are being treated like this,” Professor Insall told Times Higher Education.

One of his team was actively seeking positions in laboratories outside the UK given the scale of visa fees and health surcharges, he added.

“One of my postdocs has a stay-at-home wife and two children, and he is getting clobbered by these charges. Someone on my professorial wage might be OK, but it’s absolutely slaying his salary as a postdoc. He will be leaving the UK for another job as soon as it becomes available rather than paying these charges,” continued Professor Insall.

Nino Läubli, president of the University of Cambridge’s Postdoc Society, which represents about 4,000 early career researchers, said the “current visa and IHS costs are already a substantial financial burden for many within the community.”

“Unfortunately, cases of postdocs required to take out loans or getting into debt to cover the costs for themselves or their families [are] not isolated,” continued Dr Läubli.

“I would not be surprised if an increase in IHS puts further stress on the already tense and challenging situation related to the UK’s recruitment and retention of highly educated academic and research staff,” he added.

Several UK universities, including UCL, have committed to pay the visa costs of job applicants, although this is not a sector-wide practice, and health surcharges are generally not covered. International scholars say the total cost of renewing a two-year visa for a single person can exceed £2,000, once hidden admin costs are included, and legal fees can cost the same amount.

Ana Braz, a materials scientist from Brazil who is now working in the pharmaceutical sector, said she paid £1,200 in 2015 when applying for a visa to study for a PhD at the University of Nottingham but is worried that today’s costs would have been unaffordable. “My family’s entire income was £800 a month, so it was a huge expense, particularly as I had to fly four hours to the nearest visa office in São Paulo, which cost another £250.”

“I was lucky because my scholarship later covered these costs, but not everyone is in this privileged position,” said Dr Braz, who has helped organise a parliamentary petition against the health surcharge and visa fee rises, which has attracted nearly 17,000 signatures.

With the health surcharge rising above £1,000 a year, many postgraduates, doctoral researchers and postdocs now viewed the levy as “unfair” and “excessive”, continued Dr Braz. “We are being double-taxed as international staff already pay taxes on our earnings like British nationals,” she said. Many employers were also overlooking international PhDs because sponsoring their visa costs had become too expensive, added Braz. “When you apply to small companies, in particular, you just don’t hear back because they know about these costs, which places foreign applicants at a huge disadvantage,” she said.

In a statement, the government said the Home Office “does not make a profit from visa fees”, which are used to cover the “wider cost of running the migration and borders system”, while the health surcharge had been reviewed to “ensure it reflects the genuine cost to the NHS of providing healthcare to IHS payers”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com