Petition: Stricter points‑based immigration system for the UK

[VoiceforUK2026]

I’ve started a Change.org petition calling for a fairer, stricter points‑based immigration system. The aim is to ensure people coming to the UK have the skills we need, while protecting public services and local communities. It’s addressed to the Home Secretary and UK Parliament.

Please read and sign if you agree:

https://c.org/XCFHm9KZ67

What is the system now?

Don't ask questions like that, it might reveal some facts!

🤣🤣

Could you please explain how the current system differs from your demands?

Several of the things you demand in large capitals are already covered, IMO. Legal immigrants pay a massive NHS fee, for instance. And Labour is increasing ILR qualifying period to 10 years, so no one will be able to claim benefits until they have been here for 10 years. There is already an English test required.

One thats clearly ineffective and not working 🤷‍♀️

Not as ineffective as British ability to have children though!

I read your petition. It’s quite…um wide ranging?

Meanwhile we still need people willing to work as carers, fruit pickers, food processing workers, NHS cleaners and nurses, hospitality. Homegrown Brits either can’t, or won’t, fill these roles and these industries / services would collapse without immigrants to work in them.

As a pp says several of your demands are already more or less met. One big problem is that the British state is pretty rubbish at monitoring and enforcing visa conditions and preventing overstaying. The laws are already there - we don’t enforce them effectively.

The bigger issue is lack of growth and increasing inequality in the UK. It’s easy to share when the cupboards are full, not so easy when the shelves feel bare as they do now for many ordinary people in the UK.

Any change I would start with student visas. Some of the places called universities do not offer degrees of high quality and probably well below the standard obtainable in most countries of origin.

Agree about enforcement and overstaying. Student visas if reduced would start to tackle this issue.

There are already v strict rules around student visas such that I have to regularly report meetings with my international students to the home office to show they are studying.

If student visas are cut, universities will go broke. Simple as that. And so if you want over 1000 redundancies in each university town around the uk, then go ahead. But it won’t help the economy.

ID cards would make a much bigger difference to illegal working and those dodgy vape shops etc.

Flooding an already breaking infrastructure with record numbers of immigrants doesn't fix our declining birth rate though. it just makes the NHS waiting lists longer and affordable housing even harder to find for the children who are being born here.

Immigrants aren’t getting the affordable housing. There is no affordable housing because successive governments have ignored the problem and not provided money to local governments to build social housing. You think if we stopped all immigration or deported everyone there will suddenly be council houses available.

Change.org petitions are a total waste of bandwidth. They used to be a thing before Parliament set up their own online petition system (which was pre-Brexit so they're long-obsolete). What is even the point of them? The government never even sees them. You should have started it on the parliamentary petitions website if you wanted it to do anything.

Well they’re being housed somewhere.

@Marmalademorning Yes not in council properties. Unfortunately some politicians want you to think immigrants are responsible for all of this countries problems. They aren’t.

Yes, in homes we pay for with our own wages.

I lived in a flat I owned in zone one in London, a flat I as an immigrant paid for myself with my wages. After usual taxation and the nhs surcharge for immigrants. Before that I lived in rental properties or houseshares, again, rent I paid with my wages.

All immigrants already have BRPs, which are ID cards really. Now replaced by evisas. Dodgy employers ignore them.

Sorry I can't agree with all the points on the petition so won't be signing it. Dual citizenship banned? Private faith only? Believe & practise only in private? Sorry that's a huge NO from me. Christianity's already under enough attack as it is, I refuse to support anything that would restrict us further.

I’m not aligning myself with the OP, whose petition I think is bonkers.

But 47% of London social housing is occupied by immigrants (18% are foreigners).

This is a stupid way to run the system. Social housing is a big explicit and implicit subsidy.

If wages are too low for people to afford to live where they need to for work then the answer is for wages to rise. If they don’t need to live there for work then it’s better that that housing be used by those who do. There’s some case for subsidizing to keep communities together who have always lived in a place. Those arguments are fairly weak when applied to people who are actually local (given the cost and what else that money could be spent on) but entirely absent when applied to people who are not local to the area at all.

I don’t think that at all. I’m fully aware that there are immigrants who come here, integrate, work and contribute to our society.

First of all, it’s the most AI generated thing I’ve read this morning. Secondly, why did you feel the need to shout every other word? Thirdly, nationality based only on the father? I feel like I’ve woken up in Victorian England with that one!

Most people would argue we have an immigration issue in this country which needs some kind of reform. Very few would agree with your approach. I’d hazard a guess that a lot of people are willing to help those in need, just at a more sustainable rate. This country has become so intolerant and selfish and you are clearly a part of this problem.

we need more skilled immigration (though we actually need some lower skilled too!) but your proposal would put people off living somewhere so cruel

I got tot he bit about needing a British father to be a British citizen, what a load of tosh.

This is going to blow your mind OP

My cousin was born and other than holidays has lived her entire life in Australia. She went through the Australian education system, works full time her children are Australian.

Due tot he recent change that anyone who is entitled to British Citizens having to use a British passport to enter this country.

So if she wants to visit she has to apply for a British passport, but that means she can enter the country and stay as long as she wants. Permanently if she wants.

A "points-based" system is meaningless. You could have a points-based system that says "100 points if you have a pulse" (which is not far off our current one...)

The two significant changes our legal immigration system need are (1) a hard cap on visas issued, similar to the US - once the cap is reached, that's it sorry, you have to wait for the next month/quarter's availability.

And (2) differentiation of rules for different countries. Currently we try to manage issues with restrictive rules that apply to everyone, for example, requiring high salaries to sponsor spouses. These rules then catch completely non-problematic immigration like a British guy falling in love with an Australian bartender or something, but don't do anything to restrict, for example, clan-based chain immigration where everyone in the family will work together to create some fake job with a salary that they pay back secretly in the home country.

People who are more culturally similar to us (Australians, Kiwis etc) ironically will NOT try to cheat the system like that so they are the ones who ended up being excluded by it.

FYI: many Australians for example are completely genetically British and have lived their whole lives in a very similar culture, but are not eligible for ancestry visas because the ancestry is from the 1800s. Meanwhile you get stupid examples of terrorists in the middle east being eligible for "ancestry" visas. I think this is something that surprises a lot of people who aren't familiar with the system.

As mentioned by PP - mandatory ID cards with checks on where people live would be much more effective - along with random checks on businesses to make sure they are only employing people with a right to work.