International researchers eye UK exit over health surcharge hikes

I argued for ages that the UK universities suffered from two factors w/r to foreign staff (https://theconversation.com/the-summer-when-working-in-a-british-university-lost-its-global-appeal-63431). One was low salaries relative to North American and Asian alternatives and the cost of living and the second was visa fees. As a research dean in prior employment, I successfully convinced my university to cover visa and ILR costs -- however they only did so for the employee and not their family (effectively meaning it was a tax on families but at least a step in the right direction). When I moved to Australia in the 1990s all of my and my family's visa costs were covered by the university. Ditto when I worked in Denmark and Germany. Ultimately, universities end up being collateral damage w/r to policies that are ill thought out and you end up with a situation where the left and right hands are moving in opposite directions and generally unconnected to a brain. No doubt other highly skilled internationally benchmarked knowledge based industries will also feel the pain from these policies, but for universities it makes all of the government rhetoric about 'world-class' this and 'world-beating' that little more than a euphemism of creeping mediocrity achieved one lost young academic at a time.