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Rachel Reeves has been warned that bringing back a controversial “golden visa” to woo investors to the UK would risk “rolling out the red carpet to kleptocrats, criminals and spies”, in a letter from some of Britain’s leading anti-corruption campaign groups.
Ministers have been considering introducing an investor visa for people who contribute to “strategically important” areas such as AI, clean energy and life sciences, as they try to prevent a potential exodus of millionaires from the UK.
This would be a partial replacement for a scheme that offered residency to people who put more than £1mn into the UK, later raised to £2mn, which was scrapped in 2022 soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But bringing back investor visas would risk “rolling out the red carpet to kleptocrats, criminals and spies”, the letter from Transparency International UK, Tax Justice UK, and Patriotic Millionaires UK said.
“Past experience suggests this would be misguided, offer minimal economic benefit, and expose the UK to acute national security risks by facilitating foreign influence and the flow of illicit finance,” it added.
The plans are separate from a scheme set out in last month’s spending review to expand some existing visas such as the “high potential individual visa”, the “global talent visa” and the “innovator founder visa”.
Some Labour ministers are still keen to resuscitate golden visas, although one government figure admitted that the plan had already run into logistical and political challenges. The Treasury declined to comment.
Matt Ingham, an immigration partner at law firm Payne Hicks Beach, said the introduction of a new investor visa scheme was an “absolute no-brainer” for the government.
“It would increase the UK’s attraction to internationally mobile high-net worth individuals and help arrest the current net outflows to competitor jurisdictions offering more favourable tax and immigration regimes,” he said. “It would also help us to attract much needed capital to invest in key strategic industries such as AI and renewable energy.”
But the anti-corruption groups said that claims such a visa would actually benefit the UK were “unfounded and based on flawed research”, and said there was little concrete evidence of millionaire migration out of the UK.
“Evidence suggests that the beneficiaries of any passive investment visa scheme are likely to include foreign kleptocrats, criminals and spies,” the groups said.
“In addition to carrying the cost of mitigating these serious national security risks, the people of the UK are unlikely to see any overall economic benefit at all.”
A report by the independent Migration Advisory Committee (Mac) in 2014 found that benefits to visa applicants were significant, but that it was less clear whether “UK residents benefit from the existence of the route, and even if they benefit at all”.
A Home Office review of the so-called golden visa scheme noted “inherent difficulties in an investment-based immigration route based on passive wealth, both in terms of security and economic value.”
Shortly after the visa was scrapped, then-home secretary Suella Braverman told the Commons that “the route attracted a disproportionate number of applicants from the countries identified in the UK’s National Risk Assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing 2020.”
In one case, a circular investment scheme run by Russian nationals made a total of £112mn worth of investments from 100 predominantly Chinese investor migrants, with the funds going almost exclusively to Russian companies — meaning the scheme bestowed UK visas without the country itself benefiting at all.
Australia scrapped its own golden visa programme in 2022 after the Canberra government found it was “delivering poor economic outcomes”.
Likewise Ireland ended its “immigrant investor programme” in 2023 — after a decade — as an official memo suggested it was “predominated by significant passive endowment in civil society from individuals with little or no links to Ireland involving no investment strategy and little job creation”.
However golden visa schemes still function in some European countries such as Portugal, Malta and Greece.
