to think it's unfair we have to pay a £500 surcharge for the NHS

[alaskanbaby]

My DH (let's call him Mr. Alaska) and I both work full time, and pay income tax like everyone else, which goes towards our use of the NHS like everyone else. We've just found out that we need to fork out a £500 surcharge for his use of the NHS as part of his extension of his immigration visa (for being my husband of 5 years, and father of our 18 month old DD - both she and I are British, though I guess she's sponging off the NHS quite a bit). Am I being unreasonable to think it's unfair that my DH has to pay twice?

For those more or less saying that you can't please some people, the current rules are such:

If you, as a British person, fall in love with, marry, and want to live in the country of your birth with a person who happens to be foreign, you must be earning £18,600 a year in order to even be eligible to sponsor them for a spousal visa.

You must first apply for leave to remain, which is £649 for a postal application or £1049 if you apply in person (if you apply by post it can take up to 8 months or more to receive an answer and both of your passports must go with the application). This gives you leave to remain for a whopping two years.

You must then apply for further leave to remain, with the same cost attached.

You can finally apply for settlement five years after your initial application, with - you guessed it - another application fee.

Finally, after all that, citizenship is just over £1,000.

Bear in mind that during all that, if you (the British citizen) lose your job or if your salary changes in any way, your partner's visa may not be renewed as you no longer satisfy the income requirements. During that time you won't be able to plan your life more than the next visa application ahead, and you certainly won't be able to save for a mortgage, because every penny you have is going towards these fees. And the gov.uk guidance on the process is as clear as muck, so be sure to save for some lawyers' fees whilst you're at it -- because if you mess up that form they will reject your application, you won't get the fee back, and much more significantly you will have to choose between living in a different country from your partner, or uprooting your entire life and leaving the country you were born in - if, that is, your partner's country allows you to emigrate there.

£500 for the NHS may seem fair. But in this context, I don't think the OP is BU. It's the straw that breaks the camel's back, and it's part and parcel of a political attitude that sees immigrants as numbers on a spreadsheet rather than as individuals who contribute in a wide range of ways to the country, not least of all financially.

No YANBU, if people come in fresh, fair enough it might help health tourism. I wouldn't object if we moved back to the UK and both of us had to pay (me being British, DH not) but after all that time your DS has been in the UK and paying tax, that's a bit of a cheek IMO.

£500 is nothing that's a year supply of an inhaler. An mri is something like £2k a go.

The nhs is not free. We all pay for it. None of us ever pays in more than we take out. Don't believe me? Look up bnf online and admire the price of medication bearing in mind the prescription charge is a subsidy only for the majority of drugs.
Then add in wage cost and equipment cost.

Don't like it? Try america-they charge for every cotton wool swab they use on you.

(Apologies if I have missed out any of the stages of the 5-year route or have got any figures slightly wrong; DH and I were incredibly fortunate and underwent the 2-year route to settlement as we started before the rule change, and as I say the gov.uk website is not easy to squeeze information out of).

I think you've been unlucky as you will be in the minority of the people having to pay that have already contributed so much over a long period of time. I guess it's far cheaper to have simple rules and regs to administer it. I think NHS will soon be no longer free for anyone

Florriesma

But - why should a taxpayer, who has paid into the system for a decade, have to pay a surcharge when, say, a 21 year-old who has been at university and never yet had a job, doesn't?

I wish it were that simple here in the USA for visas... Our family pays $550 a MONTH for the required insurance, whih is crap as barely covers anything of doctor visits. I have a possibly broken hand and haven't been to the doctors because it would be $75 copay before even an X-ray. We only go to the doctor for the kids or anti biotics :(

Hand on heart, The only part of the rules I don't like is that it used to be virtually free to do all this. Your spouse didn't have to sponsor you, you didn't have to meet a salary threshold and the application to get ILR was almost free. £275 to get citizenship, no one charged a thing to transfer an ILR stamp from old to new passport. No £500 fee for NHS services, either.

No way they'll start charging British-born in same ways, but I agree the charges on non-citizens just seem to keep piling up and up with no end in sight.

It only just works as an NHS. I'm not sure we have the funds for an IHS.

HERE IS A FLUFFY PUPPY s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/6f/e0/95/6fe09532fea07874bfb1b0c32212fbe0.jpg

I understand OP being annoyed and I understand people saying OP is being unreasonable but can we all just look at the fluffy puppy and remember that we are all lucky to live in this country. Why can't we be friends?

To be fair to op I have concerns about the wage threshold to bring into UK. I think it's unethical.
But..moving country is expensive. If I were to go outside of eu I'd have to lump the rules of wherever I landed.
21 yo may not have worked yet but I would expect that they would be contributing over the next 50 yrs. Some 21 yo may never be able to work. It is a collective insurance not a personal insurance.

Is he required to have his visa as part of his contract of employment? If so could it make these fees tax deductable? Just a thought as it might help to alleviate some of the pain.

blazingardor.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/tumblr_lv178kzjq01r6l69so1_500.jpg

Florriesma

A collective insurance to which many non-EU immigrants contribute!

I can just about see the justification for this fee coming as part of student visas, as obviously international students won't be paying tax and unless they're foolish enough to fall in love with a Brit among their cohort not as likely to be contributing for an extended period of time in the future. But for visas on which people are en route to settlement, and are basically committing to spending a lifetime paying into the pot...? To me it just seems to be another way of pricing out visas so only the already privileged can get them.

CatMilkMan

provisional. I take your point. Hadn't thought of it like that.
A colleague is going through the immigration process. He doesn't say much about it but I have been shocked at the price of a citizen ship ceremony I think it was. That seemed a bit pointless although he and his family enjoyed it.

Provisionally anxious. Of course it's about pricing anyone but the privileged out. Goes hand in hand with that godawful minimum earnings of £35k after six years rule, which will see us lose plenty of experienced nurses soon.

Florriesma I think the ceremony itself is relatively cheap, but it's the administration fee for citizenship that's really costly. You have to do the ceremony I believe - swearing allegiance and all that...!

WidowWadman Yes, it's rather bleakly ironic. The gain made by those £500 surcharges won't go anywhere to repairing the cost of losing those nurses.

Florriesma the charge for the ceremony is only 80 quid. The actual application fee, plus fee for LITUK test plus fee for language test, plus fee for remote application (so I didn't have to surrender my passport for an indeterminate amount of time to an organisation which refuses to even respond to your enquiries about progress before 6 months have gone by, even if they haven't sent you as much as an acknowledgment after taking the 900 quid application fee), quickly adds up.

The citizenship ceremony btw must be booked within 21 one days of the date on which your approval letter has been despatched (2nd class, I received mine 10 days after the date of the letter) and take place within 90 days, or they cancel the approval and keep the fee.

The same nurses who also have to pay the same healthcare surcharge on top of income tax, NI and the privilege of propping up the NHS.

The ceremony was nice although I felt slightly put off by being implored to "become part of the community" when all of us sworn in that day by default already have been part of the community for several years as a prerequisite to getting to that ceremony.

Yes it was the associated costs to go with it that I was shocked by and he did say about the time limits. I'm used to public sector bureacracy but that level of paperwork is shocking.
Our immigration system seems draconian, I don't think that people get that as a rich country we are always going to attract immigrants or that this is a good thing.

Total cost is actually close to £6,000

Settlement visa: £1556 (with health surcharge)
Renew visa: £1249 (with health surcharge)
Indefinite leave to remain: £1500

Naturalisation: £1005
Life in the UK Test: £50
English test fee: ?

Other costs: possible 'premium' fees, postage costs, rip-off exchange rates overseas, etc.

As to why it's so expensive? It's simple, immigration has spiralled out of control, we are taking in too many immigrants and the government has decided to try and make some money out of it. In 1997 33,379 citizenships were granted TOTAL. In 2013, more than that number went to JUST ONE COUNTRY - India.

We are taking too many immigrants. This year - 500,000 more in the UK than last year. 25% of all births to foreign-born mothers.

It's grossly excessive, every year for the last decade we have had population growth of around 500,000 - that's five million more people since 2005 - or more than the population of Ireland.

These costs are not a reaction specifically to the NHS, they are simply about TOO MANY IMMIGRANTS. Individually, (mostly) they are lovely. But in aggregate there are just too many. Swingeing fees will hopefully reduce the numbers, so we don't collapse under the weight.

Bloody hell YANBU. I immigrated 9 years ago before most of the crap and high fees started. Got sticker shock when I applied for citizenship recently, it's going to end up costing about £1230 including passport but I'm worried about what the government might try in the future.

Also I want the right to vote.

DoughDoe, most of the immigrants in the last 10 years are EU and swingeing fees won't touch them.