Rishi Sunak announces earning threshold hike will not come into place until 2025

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Rishi Sunak has announced that plans to hike the earnings threshold for bringing family members to Britain will not be fully imposed until 2025 after the announcement came under fire.

The Prime Minister said the minimum salary requirement would still be raised to £38,700, but conceded the hike would be "phased" in over the next year, despite anger from some Tory MPs about the rowback.The Government on Thursday, December 21, quietly announced the threshold would first be increased to £29,000 in the spring, and then increased in "incremental stages", without setting out a timetable.On a visit to the headquarters of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire Air Ambulance on Friday, he told broadcasters: "We're increasing the salary threshold significantly, and we're doing it exactly as we said we were doing it, we're just doing it in two stages."So we'll go up in a few months' time and then it will go off again the full amount in early 2025.

So it's exactly what we said we're doing, just phasing it over the next year or so."Ministers were previously criticised for raising the minimum requirement from £18,600 to £38,700, with concerns over families being disrupted and the scale of the increase.The climbdown has angered hard-line Conservative MPs in favour of tighter migration controls.David Jones, deputy chairman of the right-wing European Research Group, told the PA news agency on Friday: "The latest net migration figures very starkly showed the extent of the crisis we face.

Increasing the threshold was absolutely necessary to address that crisis."The Government should have stuck to its guns. Yesterday's decision was a regrettable sign of weakness, made worse by the fact that Parliament was not sitting and therefore was unable to