Visas: Highly Skilled People

Lord Fox Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for that question. The Government look at all this in the round. As I think everyone in your Lordship’s House knows, the overall intention is to reduce net migration, but we are committed to the high skills routes and I am very happy to provide more detail on that later. We will continue to measure not only the incomers but the net effect.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, nearly six months ago, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Department for Business and Trade jointly launched a taskforce and a £54 million fund to, in their words,

“attract world-class researchers and their teams to the UK”.

As the Minister knows, teams of researchers contain all sorts of different people, but some of the key people are not necessarily the best paid people in that team, and those salary restrictions may well not meet the Home Office’s criteria. What is the Home Office doing to work with the taskforce to make sure that a whole team can come to the United Kingdom, which would probably affect whether it came or not? How many visas have been applied for so far under this taskforce and how many have been granted?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

As I just said in response to my noble friend, this is all currently under consultation. We will, of course, look at all the routes in the way the noble Lord asks me to. To be clear, salary levels are not the only things that will influence our approach to global talent, high-potential individuals and the various schemes that we have. As I have already said, we will be careful to avoid the unintended consequences. On the specific question about numbers, I do not have them now but I am happy to write to the noble Lord.