UK to review cases of Indian professionals being denied visas

The UK Home Office has agreed to review the cases of hundreds of highly-skilled Indian professionals being denied their right to live and work in the country over "trivial" tax corrections.

Britain's Home Office minister for immigration, Caroline Nokes, was grilled by the influential House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee yesterday over media reports that professionals who came in on a Tier 1 (General) are being refused their Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) over minor, legally acceptable corrections in their tax returns.

"This potentially sends a terrible signal, does it not, to highly skilled people of Indian or Pakistani origin who have come over here and have contributed to the country, bringing their skills," questioned John Woodcock, an Independent MP from the committee.

"Of course, I do not want this country to look like it is unwelcoming to people with high skills who have contributed a great deal. It is important to us that going forward we make sure we have culture change in the Home Office," Nokes replied, stressing that she is determined to address immigration-related problems following the Windrush scandal involving Caribbean migrants from before the 1970s being wrongfully denied their citizenship rights in the UK.

"It is not about using rules to have a 'computer says no' mentality," she said.

The Chair of the committee, Labour MP Yvette Cooper, demanded why the minister had not asked for a "review of these HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs] related Tier 1 cases to find out how many of them might be serious fraud cases and how many of them might be trivial mistakes that any one of us could have made?"