From 8 April 2026, the Home Office will increase immigration and nationality fees by between 6% and 7% across almost every application type. Leave to Remain rises to £1,407 per applicant. Indefinite Leave to Remain climbs to £3,226. Employer sponsorship fees for larger organisations hit £1,682. And the settlement route — the path to permanent residency — is being extended from five years to ten for most sponsored workers.
On paper, this looks like a government getting tough on immigration. In reality, it’s nothing of the sort. These fee increases don’t reduce immigration numbers by a single person. They simply extract more money from people who are already following the rules. The government is treating legal immigrants as a revenue stream while failing to address the fundamental question: how many people should the UK be admitting each year, and why?
Taxing the Compliant, Ignoring the Crisis
The perversity of this approach is staggering. A skilled worker who has spent five years in the UK, paid their taxes, contributed to the economy, and followed every rule is now being told they need to wait ten years — not five — before they can settle permanently. Meanwhile, the government has failed to stop the Channel crossings, failed to process asylum claims in any reasonable timeframe, and failed to remove those whose claims are rejected.
This is the worst of all worlds. The people who play by the rules get punished with higher costs and longer waits. The people who bypass the system entirely face no meaningful consequences. It’s an immigration policy designed to look tough in press releases while achieving nothing in practice.
The so-called “Visa Brake” is another example of this performative approach. From March, Skilled Worker applications from Afghan nationals and student visa applications from nationals of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar, and Sudan are automatically refused if made from outside the UK. This affects a tiny number of applications while the overall immigration figures remain at historically unprecedented levels.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Net migration to the UK remains vastly higher than anything seen before 2020. The government promised to bring numbers down. They haven’t. Every quarter, the figures come in higher than projected, and every quarter the government finds a new way to repackage the same failure as progress.
Fee increases don’t address the structural drivers of high immigration: an economy addicted to cheap overseas labour, a health service that can’t train enough domestic staff, a university sector dependent on international tuition fees, and a care system propped up by underpaid workers from abroad. These are policy failures, not problems that can be solved by charging higher visa fees.
Reform UK has consistently argued for a fundamentally different approach: an annual cap on immigration set by Parliament, genuine investment in training British workers, and an end to the revolving door of temporary visas that suppress domestic wages. That’s what controlling immigration actually looks like — not bumping up application fees while the numbers keep climbing.
The Settlement Betrayal
Extending the settlement period from five years to ten is particularly cynical. The government is marketing this as “earned settlement” — a points-based system where migrants demonstrate their contribution over a longer period. But in practice, it creates a decade of uncertainty for workers and their families, during which they remain on temporary status with fewer rights and less security.
This doesn’t reduce immigration. People will still come. They’ll just spend twice as long in a precarious legal position, paying fees every time they renew their visa, generating revenue for the Home Office while lacking the stability that comes with settled status. It’s exploitation dressed up as policy.
If the government genuinely wanted to reduce the number of people settling in the UK permanently, it would reduce the number of people entering in the first place. Instead, it’s maintaining high entry numbers while making life harder and more expensive for those already here. This satisfies no one and solves nothing.
What Real Immigration Control Looks Like
Britain needs an honest conversation about immigration — one that doesn’t hide behind fee schedules and bureaucratic reshuffles. The question isn’t how much we charge people to come here. The question is how many people the country can sustainably absorb while maintaining public services, housing supply, infrastructure, and social cohesion.
Reform UK’s position is clear: set an annual cap, enforce it transparently, invest in domestic skills and training, and ensure that when we do bring in workers from overseas, it’s because we genuinely need them — not because it’s cheaper than training our own people. That’s controlled immigration. What Labour is doing is theatre.
“Raising fees on legal immigrants while failing to control the borders isn’t immigration policy — it’s a protection racket.”
Today’s fee increases will generate headlines about the government “getting tough.” They’ll do nothing to address the pressures that communities across Britain are feeling. Until there’s a government willing to have the honest conversation about numbers, capacity, and control, those pressures will only grow — and voters will continue turning to the only party offering real answers.