Six years ago almost to the day, with my 15-month-old daughter strapped to my chest, I fought back tears, waved my husband off at Bengaluru airport in India and boarded a plane back to the UK. I wasn’t sure when I’d see him again, or when he’d see his child.
Even though he was the foreign spouse of a British citizen (at that point, we had been married for more than five years) and the father of a British child, he had no right to accompany us when we relocated to the UK. This despite the protestations of friends and relatives, who felt sure we’d not done our research properly.
A minimum income threshold in order to apply for a spouse visa was introduced by Theresa May in 2012, but public consciousness of the policy – then as much as now – was low outside those people directly affected. It was set at £18,600 a year, but the devil was in the details.
As we dug deeper, we realised that I needed to produce six months of continuous payslips proving the income before a visa application could even be submitted. I had a job offer with a salary above the threshold waiting for me back in the UK, and my husband already earned above the threshold in India – yet this meant a “best-case” scenario of nine months apart in order to relocate our family from his home country to mine, once the visa processing time was taken into account.
In the end, our time apart was closer to a year. My husband missed our daughter’s first sentences, her transition out of a cot and her second birthday. In the process, she forgot the Hindi he’d lovingly sung and spoken to her since birth.
Commuting to a full-time job to meet the income requirement while in essence being a single parent meant that I too saw far less of her, and my mental health spiralled out of control. All of that time was spent wondering if we’d made the right choice.
In all of this, we were the lucky ones. Our application, while onerous and expensive, went through smoothly. Then, the basic fee for a two-and-a-half-year spousal visa was about £1,500. Now, it stands at £1,846.
After a small amount of lobbying, our local MP wrote a letter to the Home Office in support of our application, despite having voted in support of the policy. Crucially, my mother stepped in to care for our daughter and to prop me up emotionally.
Ultimately, we were reunited. Six years and three visas later, my husband has indefinite leave to remain, and we finally have a degree of security. Tragically, there are now children who have been separated for more than a decade from one of their parents, and couples who know there is no realistic possibility of them living in the same country. There will now be many more.
On 11 April, a new income threshold for spousal visas will come into place, set at £29,000. The threshold will go on to more than double from its original rate, rising to about £34,500 later this year, and then to about £38,700 in early 2025. This is part of the plan of the home secretary, James Cleverly, to reduce immigration. Migration Observatory research suggests that the new threshold means that about 50% of employed British citizens cannot “afford” to have a foreign spouse, which will rise to 70% by 2025.
The Home Office will tell you that this is to ensure “integration” and to avoid a burden on taxpayers. This is not true. Those on a spouse visa already have no recourse to public funds, pay an annual NHS surcharge and have the best possible support – a spouse – when adjusting to life in the UK. Separated families, on the other hand, struggle financially and emotionally, the collateral damage of a policy incomprehensible even to the MPs who voted for it.
I’m writing this in the early hours of the morning, having just relieved my husband from night duty caring for a toddler – our second child – who is feeling miserable with an ear infection. Night-wakings and poorly children are still very much a feature of family life. But we are doing it together, and we’ve never lost our sense of how precious, how essential, that is.
Families belong together. The spouse income threshold, unparalleled in any other country, means that our government stands in opposition to this fundamental and most sacred of rights.
Maegan Dobson Sippy is a children’s book editor and writer
