The leaked news that the Home Secretary is planning to scrap the UK’s ‘golden visa’ program is highly welcome. For too long, Tier 1 Investor visas have laid out the red carpet to dirty money, giving kleptocrats, fraudsters and criminals easy access to UK residency and then citizenship.
However, the government must also commit to make public the findings of its review, started four years ago, into who has entered the UK under the Tier 1 Investor route, and the security risks they pose, at the earliest opportunity.
The government must be transparent about what it has found in the course of this review and what steps it has taken to address any risks posed by corrupt or criminal actors using the golden visa route. The identities of those who pose such a risk who received golden visas should be made public.
Past mistakes must not be repeated, or new loopholes created. So the government should also lay out what steps it will take to build institutional capacity within the Home Office to stop those with corrupt or criminal sources of wealth being granted residency.
