The UK is paying the price for world’s most expensive visas

Paul Nurse won a Nobel prize for his work as a geneticist and now runs the world-renowned Francis Crick Institute in London.

He has always been at the cutting edge of scientific discovery, but he worries that Britain’s global leadership in the field is being harmed by government immigration policy.

“The visa fees are so exceedingly high that it makes coming here very difficult for some people,” he says. “We are fishing for the best scientists in the world. They want to come and work here because we are such an effective country at science, but if we have these high costs, they can and will go elsewhere. We are not competitive.”

More than two-thirds of researchers at the Crick are from abroad, and the institute is paying almost £800,000 a year on visa fees. “That is the running costs for two entire research groups,” Nurse says.

After Donald Trump’s decision to slash research funding, “we have great opportunities to recruit from the US and we have great opportunities with people from the rest of the world who would have naturally gone to the US and are now extremely interested in coming to the UK,” he says. “What we are doing is slapping a huge immigration tax on them.”

“It’s the equivalent of saying the Premier League cannot hire any footballers who come from overseas. What would that do to high-quality football? It would disintegrate – and that is exactly what they are doing to us in science.”

With the life sciences industry worth an estimated £94bn to the UK economy, Nurse thinks the approach is fundamentally at odds with the government’s growth mission. “Research and science drive discoveries, discoveries drive economic growth, and good discoveries are driven by high-quality people,” he says.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, promised at the World Economic Forum in Davos to review the visa system to encourage more high-skilled workers as part of the drive to kickstart growth. An immigration white paper, out this week, will streamline the bureaucracy and expedite the application process for more top scientists, but there will be no reduction in fees.

Cancer Research UK fears the immigration system is holding back potentially life-saving discoveries. The UK has become the most expensive country in the world for work and study visas, according to the Royal Society. Fees rose 126% between 2019 and 2024, and upfront immigration costs are now up to 17 times higher than the average across countries including the US, South Korea and Australia.

Researchers recruited to work in the UK have to fund a £1,035 annual immigration health surcharge, which must be paid in full in advance, as well as up to £1,519 in visa fees. For a family of four, the upfront costs can total almost £30,000.

Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, says the government needs greater “coherence” in its approach to international talent. “We live in a turbulent world, and we should be doing all we can to bring investment, and the brightest and best scientific researchers and their life-changing discoveries, from cancer treatment to new technologies, to the UK.”

The stark warnings from Britain’s top scientists are a vivid reminder of the tensions between competing economic and political imperatives across Whitehall on immigration.

For the Home Office, the overwhelming priority is to drive down the number of people coming to the UK. The white paper will introduce new curbs, raising the skilled visa threshold to graduate level, and imposing time limits on lower-skilled workers. Businesses will be told to train up British employees rather than hiring staff from abroad under plans built on the principles of “control, contribution and community cohesion”.

The Treasury, however, has long relied on the fiscal boost delivered by immigration, and the Department of Health and Social Care needs foreign doctors, nurses and care workers to staff the NHS. The Department for Education is concerned about the impact on universities, many already struggling financially, of any reduction in graduate visas for international students, who pay high fees.

One DfE source says: “Obviously there are concerns about immigration and Reform, but if we see universities go under or make redundancies there will be a huge economic impact in those communities. There’s a danger that in order to head off one type of grievance we then create another.”

Timing is everything, and Labour insiders say Downing Street is frustrated that the white paper, which was supposed to have come out months ago, is only now being published in the wake of Nigel Farage’s victory in the Runcorn byelection and a slew of council elections.

“No 10 is furious because this has been delayed so much that it looks like a response to Reform,” one senior source says. “The Home Office just wants to get the numbers down without distinguishing between different kinds of immigration. That creates a distorted set of policies and a lot of inconsistencies.”

Those around Starmer point to Roy Jenkins, the liberal home secretary in the 1960s, as a model for dealing with immigration. He introduced tighter rules but also emphasised the importance of “mutual tolerance” and “cultural diversity”, in stark contrast to the “rivers of blood” rhetoric of Enoch Powell, then a Conservative frontbencher.

One Downing Street source said: “People see the boats and asylum hotels, which are disastrous for social cohesion. If you’re not tackling the thing the voters say they care about, then whose interests are you serving? This is not just about immigration – it’s about trust in democracy.”