Visa grants to live in UK drop while asylum applications hit record high

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The visa was granted to live in the United Kingdom, which decreased by a third throughout the past year, driven by policy files and the slowdown in the labor market, even with asylum requests to the highest level ever, according to home office data.
The numbers published on Thursday showed 956,000 accommodations in 2024, a 32 percent decrease in levels in 2023 and 2022.
During the same period, 108,000 people of control numbers recorded an increase of 18 percent in 2023 and higher than the previous peak of 103,000 in 2002.
Numbers related to residence visas – which come at a time when the government weighs options to make further changes in politics Migration -The ministers will be reassured that the net deportation numbers have already been set sharply from a record level of 906,000 in mid -2013.
But the high requests for asylum, after an increase in the arrivals that are not regular by the small boats that the voters do not like, confirms the challenge facing the UK government because it seeks to reduce the costs in the system and coincides with the Reform Party in Nigel Faraj.
General visa grants have decreased mainly due to a sharp decrease in visas granted to health and care workers and their families. They decreased by 237,000, or 67 percent, between 2023 and 2024 as a result of further scrutiny in domestic offices in requests and a ban on care workers who bring family.
Other skilled workers’ visas decreased by 11 percent between 2023 and 2024, with the largest drops in information technology, engineering and financing. The decrease accelerated at the end of 2024, with granted in the second half of the year almost 40 percent less than the previous year.
It is possible that the slowdown throughout the British economy, as well as the impact of policy changes, will reflect higher salaries of salaries that some employers are priced.
“The boom and statue” in the past few years still leaves the visa in general to the population other than the European Union much higher than before Britain’s exit from the European Union, “said Ben Brendel, a researcher at the Oxford Immigration Observatory.
However, the visas associated with work have decreased particularly in low -wage jobs, such as butchers and chefs, as he pointed out, as grants in the food and hospitality sector decreased by 73 percent on an annual basis in the second half of 2024.
The number of visas granted to students abroad was 14 percent lower than 2023, when it reached 393,000, with a largest decrease of 85 percent in the two students, which reflects the new ban on the family’s bringing.
However, the numbers also showed a sharp rise in the number of asylum seekers in hotels since the work reached power.
About 38,079 people were temporarily placed in hotels due to the lack of other accommodations in home offices at the end of December – much lower exhaustion He won the general elections in July 2024.
Prime Minister Sir Kerr Starmer pledged to close asylum hotels before winning a authority by speeding up the treatment of asylum claims and reducing accumulated accumulation under the previous governorate government.
The pledge has proven more difficult than it was expected after the number of people arriving in the United Kingdom through the small boat channel crossings.
The Minister of Immigration Angela Eagle admitted last month that the number of asylum hotels used has risen to 220 from 213 at the time of the elections, although the data on Thursday showed that more than 22 percent of asylum applications were addressed within six months, which is the highest percentage in about five years.
In the year until September 2024, the United Kingdom obtained the fifth largest number of asylum seekers in the European Union.
The government’s ability to reduce the use of hotels and reduce accumulated requests will significantly have a continuous impact on the aid received abroad, because a large share of the official development assistance budget in the UK spends on local asylum seekers.
This week, Starmer said it would reduce the ODA budget from 0.5 percent of the total national income to 0.3 percent to finance an increase in defensive spending.
This means that a much larger percentage of ODA budget is likely to be taken by asylum in the coming years, unless the costs are reduced.
The asylum system costs 5.4 billion pounds in 2023-24, an increase of 4 billion pounds in 2022-23, according to home office data. About 4.2 billion pounds of cost was covered last year with the ODA budget.
Separate data on the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government showed on Thursday that more than 20,500 families were receiving displacement support after a demand to leave the residences of asylum provided by the Ministry of Interior in the year until September 2024. The number was 2.5 times as in the year until September 2023.
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2025-02-27 13:14:00