Three fixes to make the Global Talent Visa work
... and which frontier technologies are on the horizon?
In the past 2 years the UK has brought in the equivalent of another Birmingham in migration numbers, but we are still short of 173,000 specialists in science, tech and engineering across the economy. What's going wrong?
It’s all well and good building national institutes, constructing labs, and funding cutting-edge projects, as we’ve called for in this series, but it all counts for nothing if we don’t have the talent to make things happen.
Global talent for global ambitions
We have tough choices to make to reduce overall immigration – there is very little political support for the high levels we've seen over the past two years. But a successful immigration system doesn't just mean sustainable numbers with democratic consent, but one that also attracts the best and brightest here to help pioneer advancements. Onward’s recent paper, Reality Check, revealed that 76% of voters think immigration is too high but are supportive of scientists and engineers moving to Britain, along with doctors and teachers.
Our European neighbours warned that their researchers were experiencing difficulties moving to the UK due to visa issues and higher costs. A survey found that 44% of AI researchers in the UK consider "visa and immigration issues" serious obstacles. Somehow, despite Britain's system facilitating unprecedented immigration levels, it also frustrates the entry of the exceptional people we need.
The global competition for talent is fierce, and other countries are doing more to win. America recently revised criteria for two visa categories targeting STEM talent, leading to more visa approvals for STEM workers. Germany has made it easier for technology experts outside the EU to relocate, including by removing German language requirements for IT professionals. France offers a simplified French Tech visa route for technology sector employees, founders and investors.
What about the UK? We have the Global Talent Visa (GTV), which is supposed to attract exceptional international talent to academia and research, digital technology, and arts and culture. Yet we’re averaging only a few thousand each year through this route.
There are several challenges. First, British visa costs are much higher than other nations.1 Moving to the UK for three years costs £3,821 upfront, rising to £13,730 for an applicant with a spouse and two children. Most of this comes from the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS), which is charged per year for the visa duration and payable in full upfront. Compared to similar visas abroad, the UK's costs can be as much as three times more than Australia's. As a result, others are gaining top talent that could have been ours.
Second, the GTV's eligible fields are limited and not well-suited to attracting talent in priority technologies. Engineering biology or quantum technology specialists are not eligible unless they join a UK university or a UKRI-approved research organisation or secure endorsement through a peer-review process that requires a PhD or equivalent experience and meeting criteria tailored to active academics. This also makes the visa poorly suited for industry professionals.
The Government has recently tried to attract more international talent to its priority tech fields but with limited success. The new route of the Government Authorised Exchange visa aims to attract researchers and research interns to these fields. However, it requires companies to have a sponsorship licence and a history of Innovate UK funding. This drastically limits the pool of businesses that can benefit from the talent that the visa can bring to the UK. High application costs remain, puzzlingly, as the visa targets resource-constrained interns.
The Government should reform the Global Talent Visa to ensure it can draw in science and technology talent of strategic importance. The Government should:
Review the GTV pathways to ensure they include diverse fields and align with the Government's strategic priorities.
Secure agreements with GTV endorsing bodies to subsidise the IHS and spread its cost throughout the visa duration instead of requiring an upfront payment.
Review and streamline the eligibility and endorsement criteria to make the GTV more accessible for industry professionals.
Finding the next frontiers
Without top talent, keeping up will be a massive challenge for Britain, but not the only one. We’re not even sure that the Government selected the right technologies to prioritise. The selection process last year to decide the five was murky, with vague references to a "robust and repeatable approach." There needs to be more transparency. And our last post underlined why trying to lead in future telecoms is folly.Â
In choosing these five, the Government pushed other technologies to the side. Nuclear fusion could easily have been one of them. There’s already pioneering work at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, home to the world's largest operational fusion experiment, Joint European Torus. The same goes for advanced materials like graphene – vital for breakthroughs in quantum and electronics, with the Henry Royce Institute driving progress. There’s promise in lithium batteries for electric vehicles too, with investments in Cornwall laying the groundwork for a future battery-grade lithium hub. There are others – and more will emerge in the years to come, such as neuromorphic and chemical computing.
The Government will need to spot and understand these opportunities early. Onward has previously called for creating a Technology Futures and Intelligence Unit to provide ministers with intelligence and advice on global technological developments to inform their decisions and strategies, building on the progress made by the Technology and Insights team in the Government Office for Science. The Government has since committed to also establishing an enhanced Research and Innovation Intelligence capability within the Science Department.
Building on this the Government should produce regular analysis on the changing technological landscape, the UK's place in it, and progress on our priority technologies. It should also tool up regulators to govern emerging technologies as enablers, not inhibitors of innovation. More Onward research on this will be published soon.
Conclusion
We launched this Substack to serialise our upcoming paper Future Frontiers, with an eye to publishing it at the beginning of June. The election will delay that publication. But, as a subscriber, you’ll be the first to receive it – plus our future research on university spin-outs and our first special guest post. Watch this space, and thanks for reading.
Based on the upfront application costs for the following visas: Australia - Global Talent Visa, US - O-1 Visa, Canada - Global Talent Stream, France - Talent Passport, The Netherlands - Highly Skilled Migrant Visa, Germany - D-Visa.
The analysis is based on publicly available information from respective government online resources. Costs are estimated for a three-year visa for a single applicant and a family of four (the main applicant with three dependents: a spouse and two children under 18). Estimates are for base visa processing times, excluding any extra fees for fast-tracking.
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