Responding to the Home Secretary’s commissioning letter to the Migration Advisory Committee, Caroline Coombs, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Reunite Families UK said:

“We are pleased to see the Home Secretary commissioning the Migration Advisory Committee to review the Minimum Income Requirement (MIR) and the adequate maintenance requirement of the family migration policy.

“For too long, hidden in plain sight, the policy has devasted the personal life of countless loving couples and families who were denied the possibility of being together in the UK just because they didn’t earn the right amount or couldn’t meet the increasingly impossible hurdles put in front of them in order to do so.

“We understand from the Home Secretary’s letter and Prof Bell’s reply, and from the Home Secretary’s formal response served on us today in our ongoing legal proceedings, that the Committee will analyse not only the future increases which had been announced by the previous Conservative Administration (to £34,500 and £38,700), but also the increase to £29,000 already introduced in April.

“We welcome this review of the MIR as a whole, including the £29,000 threshold. The increase already introduced is the perfect example of policies made to grab headlines and driven by the imperative to been seen taking swift action on net migration. The increase was introduced without the necessary evidence and thought process needed for policies which will affect the personal lives of so many.  The MIR is a policy that whilst won’t move the dial in reducing net migration, it will only achieve the results of scarring people, children in particular, for life. 

“We consider that when deciding the £29,000 increase (and previously announced further increases) Ministers ignored their own officials and in a chaotic and hasty decision making, they decided to revise such an important policy without analysis and in breach of critical public law duties. We launched legal action against the Government over our concerns.

“Our community of over 5 thousand members as well as the many which we haven’t been able to help yet but we know are also struggling with the impacts of this policy, await anxiously the MAC analysis and we hope it will contain a variety of points of view and will outline a policy roadmap so that everyone who were born here or want to call the UK their home can enjoy such a basic human right as having a family.

“Our ideal as is for the many thousands of British and settled citizens we represent is that the review will recommend the complete scrapping of the MIR policy, as it has failed and continue to fail loving couples and families who are forcibly separated as a result of the harshness of the rules with children often being the first victims of this senseless policy.

“This new Labour administration has the possibility of following in the footsteps of the first New Labour Government in 1997 when they scrapped another terrible family migration policy: namely the Primary Purpose Rule. We really hope they will take this opportunity and reaffirm that falling in love with somebody born abroad must not be a prerogative for few people, but a right that can be enjoyed by everyone, regardless of their gender, ethnicity or where they are from in the UK.”

ENDS