Britain risks paying the price of having the world's costliest work visa fees

Competing political and economic goals on immigration are resulting in the loss of valuable skills and talent, reports political editor Rachel Sylvester

- Rachel Sylvester

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 spending 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."