This week we hosted a roundtable discussion with Kingsley Napley on the visa system for tech entrepreneurs. While there have been some positive changes and announcements for business owners, the sharp and ambitious entrepreneurs sitting round the table were bamboozled by the bureaucracy.
As bad as complexity is for entrepreneurs, however, our kafkaesque system is proving tragedy for Ukrainian refugees.
Just look at the eight bureaucratic ordeals Ukranians need to go through in order to get into the UK. Remember, these are visas for people with family members here – we aren’t letting many in (much the pity). As Rob Behrens, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman says: “It is vital the Home Office acts to correct failings in its handling of visa applications”. These are failings he and many others have previously reported.
As Jill Rutter writes, the Home Office should have been planning this back when intelligence reports were highlighting the threat to Ukraine, though it’s not too late. The Government sent in Richard Harrington as refugees minister, to work across the Home Office and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and Sunder Katwala has put forward some nifty solutions on how to fix asylum for refugees through sponsorship, which the Government should adopt.
To quote Behrens: “In this horrendous situation swift action is needed to make sure the process of getting a visa is simple, accessible and quick. Lives depend on it.”
I wasn’t the first – nor will I be the last to say it – but a few days before Putin invaded I argued here that the Home Office is unfit for purpose. It’s a crying shame to be proven right so quickly.
As well as using immigration as a humanitarian tool for supporting those in dire need, it also happens to be a driver of economic growth. It can even be both: just read the story of our Patron Sukhpal Singh Ahluwalia who arrived in the UK in 1972 as a refugee, fleeing the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. And it can be used as a tool of foreign policy too. Even before the invasion, 43% of Russians between the ages of 18 and 24 wanted to leave the country for good, with 44% of those who hoped to emigrate citing the “economic situation” as their motivation. Many of the best and brightest had already left, with between 1.6 and 2 million Russians – out of a total population of 145 million – leaving Putin’s Russia for Western democracies.
As we argued in The Way of the Future, we should proactively seek to attract people who live in places like Russia to the UK:
“Such policies have a long and global history, the most famous recent example being Operation Paperclip: shortly after the Second World War, the US actively recruited over 1,600 German engineers, persuading them to move to America. These recruits became many of the chief architects of the US space programme, including Wernher von Braun. A similar approach in the 19th century ensured that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a British engineer, rather than a French, Russian or American one, because of the government’s active steps to recruit and retain the engineering talent of his father.”
The Government did its duty by extending residency rights to BN(O)s in Hong Kong. It’s time it did the same for Ukrainans and Russians too.
Innovation Loans
The Government has launched a new series of loans worth £150 million to support innovative SMEs. Businesses with innovative late-stage projects can apply for a loan between £100,000 and £2 million.
The loans will support innovations deemed to have the strongest potential to support future economic growth and tackle social challenges. It will prioritise projects focused on the areas of the economy highlighted in Innovate UK’s plan for action.
This policy has come out of a successful pilot scheme, which has seen innovation loans of £163 million to around 200 businesses.
Demand tripled between 2017 and 2019 in the pilot, with a success rate of approximately 20%. If you do apply for one please let us know your experience. As Sam Dumitriu has written about InnovateUK’s SMART grants, the process can be challenging, and they are genuinely interested to hear and act on your experiences on the ground.
Find out more here.
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