Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of applying bandings to regional areas of the UK to the base minimum salary thresholds and occupation-specific going rates for businesses employing people with skilled worker visas.

We do not plan to introduce varying salary requirements based on location. Our aim is to have a single immigration system which works for the whole of the UK.

Every occupation is expected to be paid at least the “going rate”, which is set at the median for all UK residents who perform that role, or the median rate for all qualifying occupations whichever is higher, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings.

The salary threshold, currently £41,700 for new applicants, is in place to ensure that resident workers’ wages should not be undercut and also to protect overseas workers from being used as low-cost labour.

Having a national salary limit keeps the Skilled Worker immigration route simple to operate and allows for movement between locations for larger companies.

The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) published a review of Skilled Worker salary requirements on 17 December, and repeated a recommendation they have made many times previously, that salary thresholds should be set at a UK-wide level:

"We continue to believe that ‘regional salary thresholds also bring more complexity and may be harder to enforce within the migration system, particularly as the UK is geographically small, making it is easy to live in one region and work in another’. We also do not want to institutionalise some parts of the UK as ‘lower wage’. Furthermore, as the MAC has shown previously, wages vary far more within regions than across them so even if thresholds were set at a regional level there would still be many areas of the UK that would struggle to meet them."