The Register has asked the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology whether it was consulted on the new immigration rules and whether it was given the opportunity to assess their impact on the UK getting the most from its participation in Horizon.

Good grief! Do you really think this has been properly planned and though through, along with the various budget and inflationary consequence, to allow a quick answer to any questions?

Or more likely is a knee-jerk reaction to appease a portion of the tabloid readers too dumb to think it through for themselves?

Our inflation problem is completely misunderstood by the geniuses at the wheel.

It is mainly driven by high energy costs and taxes, which translates into higher prices and wage pressures.

Government and incompetent Bank of England are only adding fuel to the fire.

That said higher wages don't cause this type of inflation.

What I don't understand is, of all the options supposedly considered for cutting inflation, nobody mentioned the idea of cutting VAT back to 17.5%

Would that not have reduced inflation at a stroke?

Where does the gov then get the lost VAT revenue from to pay for all of the stuff we need/take for granted? NHS, schools, police, armed services, etc.

NHS - crumbly hospitals and stressed overworked staff (who were recently on strike over it); schools (ditto); police (will turn up if you dare to misgender a toddler, don't expect them to bother if it's something mundane like shoplifting); etc etc.

With another round of cutbacks to public services and more proposals to alleviate the tax burden of party donors the rich, I think public tax money is already being massively misspent.

Yeah but we will be able to get from almost London to nearly Birmingham slightly faster! That will be amazing!

> Where does the gov then get the lost VAT revenue

Well, the idea would be that it would stimulate the economy, so in the long run they would get more VAT revenue from the increased growth.

But what they did instead was to cut inheritance tax - that does absolutely nothing to stimulate the economy, and it only benefits the rich, i.e. tory voters.

Well, the idea would be that it would stimulate the economy, so in the long run they would get more VAT revenue from the increased growth.

And in the short term what do they cut?

What you are saying sounds a lot like Trussnomics, and look how well we did out of that!

Most of those researcher wages, as for care home staff, NHS, etc, ultimately come from gov funding - i.e. taxpayers. Us.

So you either cut back on what you do, or you raise taxes. If you have to meet obligations, you raise taxes, and that reduces take-home pay and thus appears as inflation to those needing to pay for energy and food.

The only higher wages that don't pressure the system are those brining in overseas money, something else Brexit has failed to help.

Raising taxes do not equal increased yield nor cutting spending does not equal worse services.

For instance currently we have the highest taxes in living memory and literally nothing works and we have zero growth.

In the short term government will see the increase in tax receipts, but that until people and businesses quickly run out of money and there will be nothing more to tax.

One thing that caused carnage in public services were Sunak's IR35 changes designed to protect interests of big consultancies and outsourcing firms.

This means any independent suppliers caught by these rules had to increase their prices at least 30%-50%, because of huge increase in their costs.

Many of these suppliers closed their business leaving less competition and also meaning larger suppliers could increase their prices too.

Basically we are paying more for getting less, for no other reason than to stuff pockets of big corporations with our money.

There is even more corruption if you look closely. For instance, many departments can't set the pay scales to attract competent workers, so they are by design forced to use external suppliers, so they de facto pay for the worker's wage, supplier profits and profits of number of agencies between the worker and the client.

Our system is highly inefficient, designed to screw the worker, tax payer and make the rich richer.

Raising taxes do not equal increased yield...

That is true, a bit like profit margins don't always rise with increased price due to less business.

..nor cutting spending does not equal worse services

Oh it usually does. Sure you can improve some efficiency in any organisation, but for something like the NHS you need folks doing stuff at a personal level, and that is a BIG cost with little realistic way round it.

a bit like profit margins don't always rise with increased price due to less business.

Here prices go up mostly because of increased costs (which are exacerbated by higher taxation). Companies need to have money to pay staff and keep the lights on.

Sure there are areas where costs are actually getting lower (for instance big consultancies enjoy virtually free workforce and can pay next to nothing thanks to Sunak's IR35 loophole) and they make massive profits (easily shifted overseas with no tax paid in the UK).

Oh it usually does

Not in this case. Inefficiency in NHS is gargantuan. System is designed to funnel as much money as possible to private agencies that make massive profits while paying workers peanuts.

The BoE really only has one lever for inflation, which is interest rates. The government could have done a lot more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/03/spain-inflation-lower-bank-england-interest-rates

Unsurprisingly, when UK inflation went up it was for reasons outside the government's control but now it's coming down they're taking all the credit for it.

meanwhile the average postdoc starting salary is lower than the new threshold at £36,000 ($45,460)

I know a cleaner who makes more than that.

This article shows sad crabs in the bucket mentality - instead of fighting for better wages, they are upset foreign colleagues have thresholds set "too high".

UK science will never grow with such a poor attitude.

Oh I agree this is a pitiful wage for an educated person, but "we" as in the UK has to either find more money to pay better, or drop our expectations to match what we can afford, or look to cheaper supplies (and services are just as much a supply as food or energy).

Our government appears to be a bunch of spineless, amoral gits who pander to a minority of xenophobes.

We have major shortages in a number of occupations. Nursing and social care are amongst the hardest hit, but we are hundreds of thousands of people short across the whole of our society. The "hostile environment" drove away talent, especially coming just after Brexit.

Some people seem to think that knee-jerk reactions and slogans-as-promises show that the government is somehow "respecting the wishes of the people". But that assumes that they have an underlying respect for the British people - which I'd say they don't, as they're not willing to be honest with them.

You can't stop the boats any more than you can stop the clouds. We have international obligations with regards to asylum seekers. We need immigrants in our society. Each of those statements is true, yet you're more likely to take a working train across the Pennines than you are to hear anyone in our Government acknowledge them.

We desperately need an adult conversation about immigration in this country.

They're playing the British people for fools. Sadly, a vocal minority of the British people seem to like it.

"We need immigrants in our society."

You mean low paid virtual slaves to perform menial jobs? Wasn't it Kelly Osbourne who commented about who would clean your toilet. The governor of NY state recently commented about how the rural communities of NY state desperately needed people to work in the fields. Reminds me of a historical time when democrat supporters needed people to pick their cotton, tobacco or sugar cane.

If we can stop with the frothing at the mouth about xenophobes for a moment and look at the real problem. Why do we need to import nurses? Why do we think it is our right to take skilled workers from other countries and use them ourselves? It is also likely that the other country funded this person's education. Do we simply not have the skills in the UK? Are UK workers to lazy? Have we ruined the education system such that you need a degree to be a nurse and then made that hellishly expensive and limited the places?

We CAN stop the boats and France/Germany/Italy etc. also have the SAME international obligations WRT asylum seekers as we do. They just move them along until they are no-longer a problem.

Not helped by the NGOs literally ferrying people across the med while the people traffickers get rich.

Why do we need to import nurses?

Money.

We can't pay them enough to make it attractive in the first place, or to retain many of them. The NHS is already the lion's share of public spending and the only way to improve that is to increase tax revenue. That might be via growth, but recent years have shown anything but, or you raise taxes.

So many people want better things, but when it comes to voting for any tax raise suddenly it is another story. Sure you get politicians talking bollocks about "cutting the fat" and tabloids talking about waste on managers, or health tourists, etc, but the largest single item of expense is on doctors & nurses salaries (about 1.3 million employed in England).

(Last I looked "health tourism" was estimated as 0.1-0.3% of NHS cost, i.e. a rounding error in the issues of growing waiting lists and so on, and a fraction of the cost of any system put in place to control it like mandatory ID cards, etc)

> Why do we need to import nurses?

Because to become a nurse in the UK, you need a degree. It's easier, cheaper and quicker to qualify as a nurse in other countries.

And since UK nurses and junior doctors are not paid enough to recoup the cost of that degree, not many people want to study nursing.

But fundamentally, if you expel foreign skilled workers, they are gone pretty quickly.. But you can't magic up domestic skilled workers to replace them. You need years to train them up, if you can even attract enough people into the trades. It drives up inflation because the existing domestic workers that there are will demand higher pay, doing less work overall only for those who can afford it. That's why plumbers/builders/electricians/mechanics are so expensive, and why healthcare staff are moving to private healthcare providers.

With you until you went off on a tangent.

The UK did not expel anyone after Brexit.

Many went home due to Covid and have (unsurprisingly) not returned because they have a better work-life balance in their home country rather than being treated like slaves in the UK. That is a cultural issue where the UK wants all the benefits of high salaries but is not prepared to work and pay for them.

Who said anything about low pay being necessary?

As to training for nurses, yes, that's been a problem for a long time. We even had a point where the government removed bursaries for training nurses, therefore expecting them to take out student loans that they could never repay on a nurses' wages.

But this is all part of that adult conversation that we need. If we want more native nurses, we have to pay to train them. We have to make the working environment for nurses an attractive one. We may need to pay nurses more to do that. Right now, when we look at the funding for training, it would be reasonable to assume that the government's strategy is to import nurses. Unfortunately, at the same time they also stir the xenophobic pot to see if there are any votes left in it. It's hardly a well thought out and consistent position to take.

You say that we should stop frothing at the mouth about xenophobes, but they are part of the problem. If we have the likes of Suella Braverman signalling to the far right that they should feel safe and secure when looking for a fight at the Cenotaph, then we have to assume that xenophobes will disrupt adult conversations about immigration with their blatant nonsense. At which point the conversation inevitably becomes pointless.

I'm not in favour of "import cheap labour". I'm also not in favour of shirking our obligations. Nor am I in favour of demonising people arriving in our society for the failings of a government that wasn't even "theirs" when the bad decisions were taken.

There won't be a solution that pleases everybody. But right now, we don't even have a workable solution, yet alone one that pleases everybody, so even small steps would be welcome.

"We have to make the working environment for nurses an attractive one"

Sadly the main aspects of working as a nurse are shitty hours (sick people don't stop being sick in the evenings or weekends) and cleaning up messes the sick people make. I have the upmost respect for the profession as it is not something I could do and they were very helpful when I had a kidney stone and was either bent double in pain or chucking my guts up. The doctors on the other hand... never saw the same doc twice, no handover as I was shuffled from ward to ward and eventually I had to get grumpy with the registrar and ask for the results of the tests done some 15hrs earlier by a previous doc and no-one had looked at.

The NHS, like the immigration system, needs a total overhaul. It is to the point where a rip-up and start again is needed as the rot of decades of mismanagement, bullshit targets and the typical British middle management heavy organisations is likely impossible to remove.

France, Germany, Italy etc DO have obligations. As most of the asylum seekers speak English it is easier for them to move them on to us. France certainly has its own issues as it still has the remnants of empire. I will happily admit that we are a primary reason these people are fleeing their countries as we helped turn them into war-torn shitholes.

Why do we need to import nurses?

We don't, but thanks to many loopholes it's a great business for agencies. They can keep wages too low to live decently on and then claim they can't find people, so they get HO to bend over and send as many cheap workers as they want. Some even say that workers from 3rd world countries are used to basic life and even minimum wage in the UK will be a luxury for them. Which is kind of racist, but that is the thinking in the corrupt government.

Are UK workers to lazy?

They have some self respect and they don't want to work for peanuts and getting the rich richer at their expense.

Do we simply not have the skills in the UK?

This is another issue that is coming from the above. Why should anyone invest in education if government let businesses import skilled workers below "market rates". Did you know that big consultancy can get a web developer at only £21k per year? Would you go to Uni and learn web development to be paid this much?

We've been in a race to the bottom for a good few decades.

"Nursing and social care are amongst the hardest hit, but we are hundreds of thousands of people short across the whole of our society. "

Do you believe that that information was only known last week. Why has the Government not been actively pushing for it's own citizens to become better educated.. No one needs foreign nationals more than they need their own unless it is a far more sinister reasoning - ie cheap labour..

You don't suddenly need hundreds of thousands of people, it's something that can be managed well in advance.

I was in hospital last week and the nurses explained to me that the average length of stay is around five years, due to poor wages and difficult working conditions, many then leave or join the private sector. I don't see how bringing in immigrants changes that situation.

And that's part of the adult conversation we need to have. As I said to another commenter, we can't underfund training and the NHS and not expect it to be seen as effectively having a policy of importing nurses. But until we can admit that, we cannot then look at how we might want to change our immigration system to better entice and support those people we are trying to attract.

Alternatively, if we decide that we want native nurses, then we need to better fund training and better fund the workplace (the NHS).

I'm not really going to say which one is better - to be honest I feel like I sit in the odd space where I have some facts but know I'm missing many, so I feel any decision I took would be ill informed.

But I won't be better informed without that adult conversation I was talking about. And neither will most other people.

And if you pay nurses more, they will spend more in the local economy - which leads to higher growth.

The "hostile environment" was started by then Home Secretary Theresa May before the Brexit referendum happened.

Yes we need to have a grown up conversation about immigration, but "immigration good, anti-immigration racist" is a simplistic view that ignores why so much of the world is looking at increasingly right wing politicians as a viable option for their respective governments.

One of the problems with large scale immigration is that it suppresses wages, especially for low paid jobs. A policy change, such as the one proposed, of a higher minimum pay threshold for immigrant workers, might actually help with that issue.

A major part of the issue this particular government face is that they have been playing the simplistic slogans for so long they can't announce anything that takes nuance into account, so their announcements have to also end up being simplistic. That's where the boats thing comes from, they want to claim to be stopping immigration, but can't stop economic immigration for fear of tanking the economy so have been slowly erroding safe routes for asylum seekers, who are a tiny fraction of immigration anyway, because it has been easy for them to crow about while not actually doing anything meaningful for so long they've stuck them selves in a corner, asylum seekers are still coming, despite it not being safe, because they running from something worse than the trip, so now the government are having to actually try and fix the problem they've let fester for so long the solution they propose is going to cause pain elsewhere. We need people to do the jobs that need doing. We can solve that with immigrants, or we can train people to do them domestically, but the training will take time, and potential trainees will need to see a reasonable incentive to go through the training and do the job. Years of stagnating wages in a highly skilled profession does not look like much of an incentive to me.

We have major shortages in a number of occupations. Nursing and social care are amongst the hardest hit, but we are hundreds of thousands of people short across the whole of our society. The "hostile environment" drove away talent, especially coming just after Brexit.

I think you take too shallow view on the issue. The "shortage" we have is artificial and is caused by unregulated agencies who have great influence on the people in charge. Nobody in their right mind is going to do this work for minimum wage, but agencies are often getting paid £50-100 (sometimes even more) per hour per social care worker and they hire as close to minimum wage as they can and if they can't find anyone desperate enough the wail about the "shortages", while pocketing massive profits. Government bends over and provides a stream of immigrants ready to be exploited and we all pay for this - we get poorer service, more expensive and additionally we have more strain on all public services, housing and so on. All so that fat cats running to social care sector get richer.

This system is inherently broken and if you advocate for immigration in that sector, you are part of the problem.

The agencies mean that the NHS have less staff on their books, which is good for them as that is an overhead. Just like the machine that goes ping. Lease it back from the company you sold it to so it is on the monthly and not capital expenditure.

But this is only one aspect of the waste in the NHS. A BBC story a couple of months back indicated it costs the NHS nearly £2000 to extract a tooth from a child. A private dentist will usually do a sedated extraction for under £500 AND will see you within weeks, if not days, rather than 12+ months.

I'm not advocating for a fully private system, the US healthcare system is enough of a warning on that one!

a private dentist will usually do a sedated extraction for under £500

Make sure you're comparing like with like. Since 2001, all general anaesthetics must be administered in a hospital with an ITU owing to the number of deaths that were occurring in the chair so NHS costs will be skewed accordingly compared with sedation.

Also, the reason that many children need extractions is that they're not getting basic dental care in the first place. That's penny wise and pound foolish.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66095984

"Some of these children will need extractions under general anaesthetic in hospital."

I'm aware that an extraction under general is much more complex but the simple fact is kids should not wait YEARS for treatment.

Basic dental hygiene starts with parents and keeping kids away from crappy high sugar and acidic foods/drinks. You can visit the dentist frequently and still have crap teeth.

Equally why do we have so many children (and adults) generally in such poor health?

Lifestyle....

Is is as simple as that.

Equally one has to ask the questions as to why it is so difficult to train and recruit our own population to do those jobs?

Why is it that these roles can only be filled by importing the workforce?

Allegedly the population is more educated than ever yet we still appear unable to fill "skilled" roles.

Could it be that the education is not fit for purpose?

Take nursing: the has been this obsession that nurses must have degrees and the associated debt to attain them. What was wrong with the former nursing colleges that worked so well until political interference?

The country is also seriously lacking in STEM subjects as well because they are "difficult". There is a lack of teachers and as you move into university courses are being axed due to lack of students and costs.

Business & Management schools are cheap to run and make money., You just need a lecture theatre and stack of online PowerPoint. You can teach 500 for the same cost as 100. Now compare that to science. Labs and facilities immediately put a cap on numbers. Take medical schools, they are hugely expensive to run and do not actually "make" money.

Now add in all those who should never have been anywhere near a university because a practical training was more appropriate. Those courses are pretty much buried because it is perceived they do not have the value of a degree. That we have tradespeople earning far more than many of the output from a university shows just who stupid that view is.

University was pushed as some magical solution to education by Labour. It was then commercialised so that instead of being a place of learning for those with the appropriate ability university became a business.

That may start to change as some realise the £60k of debt to then earn bugger all is not worth it but we are now in the cycle where the people in the system are the offspring of parent's of the same system. University is seen as a rite of passage to a some elusive job market even though 80% of those being spewed out of the sausage machine are not capable of that type of job.

Having worked at a university I have seen this at first hand. The only winners are the Student Loans Company and the businesses masquerading as university's.

Just the sort of joined up thinking needed to achieve "a science and technology superpower by 2030.".

The government is on track to achieve this by releasing radio active spiders into secondary schools and murdering the parents of any billionaires

British immigration rules have not worked well since their failure in 1066.

They worked pretty well from 1939 to 1945 though.

Um, wasn't some of that period when the phrase "Over paid, over sexed and over here" was coined?

"You can be paid 70% of your job’s usual going rate if you’ll be working in a postdoctoral position in certain science or higher education roles" (gov.uk)

Whoopee! We're due a 43% pay rise then!

Have to pay imports more then won't they. Or hire Brits.

"that the re-joining of the Horizon program was intended to appease"

No, re-joining Horizon was always the plan, it was in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. There was a massive gap simply because the Commission unilaterally delayed as leverage in the status of Northern Ireland,

"it was in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement."

Was that the agreement the Lying Shagger and his clown parade of bozos ignored?