U-turn as Johnson scraps NHS charge for health and care workers
Overseas health and care staff will be exempt from the fee levied on migrants to pay to use the NHS in a major U-turn from Boris Johnson 24 hours after he defended the policy.
The Prime Minister had come under pressure from unions, the Labour Party and the SNP to scrap the charge, as well as from a growing number of Conservative backbench MPS.
Downing Street said the Prime Minister has asked officials to remove health and care workers from the surcharge “as soon as possible”. Mr Johnson “has been thinking about this a great deal” as a “personal beneficiary of carers from abroad”, the spokesman said.
The £400 surcharge remains in place for other categories of visa applicants and will increase to £624 in October, as planned. At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Mr Johnson defended the charge. “I have been a personal beneficiary of carers who have come from abroad and frankly saved my life,” the Prime Minister said. “On the other hand, we must look at the realities. This is a great national service—it is a national institution—that needs funding, and those contributions help us to raise about £900 million.” It later emerged the cost of waiving the surcharge for health and care workers was just £90m a year.
At PMQS, the SNP’S Westminster leader Ian Blackford said the Prime Minister should be “embarrassed that this is how his Government choose to treat NHS and care workers”.
Responding to the U-turn, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “This is a victory for common decency and the right thing to do. We cannot clap our carers one day and then charge them to use our NHS the next.”
Mr Blackford said the surcharge should be scrapped altogether.
Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said: “This is long overdue. The pandemic has shown the enormous contribution of overseas workers to our health and care system.”