As part of its strategy to meet its public sector wage increase, the British government says it would increase visa applications and health surcharge paid by immigrants. 

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who had been under pressure to accept the recommendation of an independent review of pay for teachers, police, junior doctors and other public sector workers, disclosed this at a briefing on Thursday. 

“If we’re going to prioritise paying public sector workers more, that money has to come from somewhere else because I’m not prepared to put up people’s taxes and I don’t think it would be responsible or right to borrow more because that would just make inflation worse,” Mr Sunak said. 

He added, “So, what we have done are two things to find this money. The first is, we are going to increase the charges that we have for migrants who are coming to this country when they apply for visas and indeed something called the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS), which is the levy that they pay to access the NHS.

“So, all of those fees are going to go up and that will raise over a billion pounds. So across the board visa application fees are going to go up significantly and similarly for the IHS.”

The UK government recently came under pressure over public sector pay resulting in strikes across schools and hospitals. Junior doctors in England started a five-day strike on Thursday after their demand for a 35 per cent pay increase was rejected. 

The government later accepted the recommendations made by pay review bodies which would result in a 7 per cent raise for police, 6.5 per cent for teachers, and 6 per cent for striking junior doctors who are just starting their careers in the NHS.