Priti Patel outlines future plans for investment-related migration in written statement to Parliament
Following last week's closure of the Tier 1 Investor route, Home Secretary Priti Patel yesterday gave some further details of the proposed replacement scheme for investment-related migration in a written statement to Parliament.
Image credit: UK GovernmentPatel said the replacement for the Tier 1 Investor route will be delivered via reforms to the existing Innovator route this Autumn. The new scheme will see a focus on skills and active investment plans rather than passively holding assets.
The Home Secretary explained:
"The Government has concluded that arrangements for attracting investment in the migration system warrant a substantively different approach to what has gone before. It is therefore our intention that new provision for investment-related migration should be delivered through reforms to the existing Innovator route, which we expect to deliver in the Autumn of this year. This reformed offer will make provision for overseas nationals who can show they are skilled and experienced professional business angel investors, with a track record of founding and investing in innovative businesses overseas, along with access to a minimum level of funds and credible plans to engage in similar activity in the UK.
"The proposed future scheme will no longer focus exclusively on having cash in the bank and making passive investments. It will instead be focused on attracting the brightest and best through a rigorous assessment of an applicant's business background, skills, and investment plans. This will ensure those given a visa are appropriate individuals who will genuinely bring tangible benefits to the UK economy. Settlement will be conditional on applicants achieving genuine and tangible economic impacts, such as job creation, directly through their economic activity in the UK. They will ensure the British public can have confidence those who obtain this significant privilege have genuinely earned it, rather than having bought it.
"It will be for the reformed Innovator route's Endorsing Bodies to make an assessment of whether these criteria are met. The Government has already indicated the selection of new Endorsing Bodies to support the operation of the Innovator route will be delivered through a commercial exercise. We are taking steps to inform the market that this expansion of the scope and purpose of the Innovator route will form part of the commercial requirement as we go to tender in the near future.
"To be clear, these future arrangements will remain subject to Home Office security checks, alongside requiring appropriate checks by both the financial institutions handling applicants' funds and by the Endorsing Body, ensuring three levels of scrutiny of each application."
Meanwhile, the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association (IPLA) last week wrote to the Home Secretary to express concerns over the way the announcement was made to close the Tier 1 Investor route.
As noted by ILPA, the announcement that the route had been closed with immediate effect was first made via the Home Secretary's Twitter account. No advanced notice was given of the intention to close the route beyond a handful of newspaper reports in the days preceding the Home Secretary's announcement.
ILPA said in the letter: "We are concerned that this action undermines democratic procedures of accountability and any sense of legal certainty, stability, and predictability."
ILPA added that "reactionary rule-making, undertaken without consultation and in contravention of convention, undermines the possibility for adequate Parliamentary scrutiny."
The full letter to the Home Secretary can be read here.