A new, simplified visa system could attract the fresh talent our tech sector badly needs

People are the most important input for a successful tech startup. But there are more jobs that require data literate people than there are workers to fill them; two thirds of businesses say they struggle to fill their tech roles.

Solving this problem is one of the most important actions our new prime minister can take. Technology is becoming an ever-bigger part of all of our lives – and of our economy. If the UK wants to remain a nation of geopolitical importance, it has to keep creating and scaling technology companies. And while London is currently one of the best places in the world to be a tech startup, attracting more VC investment than any other city in Europe, we cannot be complacent. For this to continue, we need government to get behind startups.

That’s why this week The Entrepreneurs Network and Coadec published a manifesto that sets out how the new prime minister can enable startups to turbocharge the UK’s economic growth. Chief among these recommendations is how to ensure the UK continues to draw in talent.

The government already recognises the importance of talent to the tech sector, which is why it has created schemes like the Start-up visa. But these generous-on-paper routes are not as easy to use as they should be for early-stage companies.

Sometimes the problem is money.  Some visas are now five times more expensive than they were ten years ago, giving the Home Office an 800 per cent profit on some applications. Considering that immigrants, especially highly-skilled ones, are net contributors to the country, it makes sense to provide visas at-cost instead of at a profit. Prices shouldn’t make us less-competitive as a country.

Sometimes the problem is time. Delays mean that start ups can wait between six weeks to two months to get their visas. It should only take them three weeks, as initially promised.

And sometimes, the ambition is there but the policy detail doesn’t match it – yet. The Scale-up Worker visa allows you to move to the UK if you have a job at an approved scale-up. However, the qualification criteria listed by the Home Office would exclude some of the UK’s fastest growing scaleups and the visa still has much red tape attached. A simple fix would be replacing the existing criteria with a point-based system which scores a business based on its growth rate, staff growth, and amounts invested.

The same is true of the  High Potential Individual visa, which was meant to be a low-bureaucracy route for promising talent. Currently, graduates from a short list of top universities can use this route to move to the UK for two years within five years of their graduation date. Yet the “top university” rankings used here include a lot of criteria that are not relevant to this visa, like research output and number of Nobel Laureates on staff.

A better ranking would look at the human capital of graduates, which you can calculate using graduate earnings. If the visa was reformed in this way it would include more specialist STEM institutions, small but elite American Liberal Arts Colleges, and top business schools.

Of course, immigration is only a small part of the talent question. We should also be boosting the quality of education at home and make it easier for women to pursue rewarding careers in tech. There are good ideas for solving those problems too but, if the new prime minister wants to look at changes that can make life easier for the UK’s startups almost immediately, they should take a look at some of the quick fixes waiting in immigration policy.