Architecture firms are calling on the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to urgently review the post-Brexit visa salary rules, claiming they are choking an industry that is trying to help meet Labour’s housing targets.
They say there were hit by a double recruitment whammy when the rules changed last April, with architecture removed from the shortage occupation list and the minimum salary to get a visa increased from just over £26,000 to £45,900.
The changes in visa rules flow from a policy decision made by Boris Johnson’s government to end what it saw as the use of cheap EU labour in factories, farms, warehouses, hotels and restaurants by introducing an Australian points-based immigration system involving thresholds on English-language understanding, salaries and skills.
The law firms Kingsley Napley and Bates Wells, which are acting on behalf of several big London practices including Zaha Hadid Architects, Make Architects and HTA Design, said they had had no reply to a letter sent to Cooper in December.
It is now urging her to give an answer, reduce the salary threshold and return the profession to the shortage occupation list, now known as the immigration salary list.
Caroline Dove, a partner at HTA Design, which specialises in housing, said the increase in the salary threshold was counterproductive given Labour had set out a target of building 1.5m more homes.
Her firm employs about 240 people but she said it could not afford to hold on to graduates from overseas who come to London to train. Instead of offering them full-time jobs it is now having to let them go.
Dove said: “The senior ones are not a problem at that new threshold. People come here to be trained because it’s a great place to learn. There are great schools of architecture, and we are very thorough in what people need to know to be an architect. We train them in things they need to know so they’ve got the standards and the legal context to operate, and yet we can’t afford to hold on to them.
“There is an urgent need for skilled multi-disciplinary teams to design and deliver them. There are simply not enough architects and landscape architects to do this vital work. It [is] extraordinary that we should be excluding international architectural graduates and qualified professionals, who have studied here and been trained in UK standards, because the salary threshold has suddenly been raised so high.”
Before the salary changes last April, architecture firms were able to recruit architects from the EU at ease as the profession was on the shortage occupation list – a list that also covered NHS workers.
Camilla Rich, a HR manager at Make Architects, said the change had had a significant impact on the business.
“It’s not just the increase in salary but also the knock-on effect it has on other visa costs, sponsoring qualifications, and ensuring fair pay across all our salary bands,” she said. “All of this means recruiting from overseas has become much more difficult, restricting our ability to hire the best talent for the job, particularly at graduate level.”
Marcia Longdon, an immigration partner at the law firm Kingsley Napley, said the changes were having a knock-on effect on firms’ ability to staff projects and progress work, with clients reporting the salary threshold was “simply too high for this sector”.
Mouzhan Majidi, the chief executive of Zaha Hadid Architects, which has designed projects from the stingray-shaped swimming pool building in London’s Olympic Park to BMW’s headquarters in Leipzig, said the global success of the sector in the UK depended on the ability to recruit architects.
Kingsley Napley and Bates Wells are also calling on the government to commission the Migration Advisory Committee to undertake a full review of the industry to provide further evidence that the changes were warranted.
