The UK government quietly debated a new investor visa this month. On June 10, according to the Financial Times, the Cabinet Office gathered tax advisers, economists, professional services firms, and anti-corruption groups behind closed doors. Attendees were sworn to secrecy.
A £5 million (approximately US$6.6 million) stake in British businesses would open a path to citizenship in as little as five years. Property would not count, and entry would be invite-only.
Inside government, Business Secretary Peter Kyle has emerged as the idea’s main champion. He frames the effort as a “brutal fight for global talent.”
Enthusiasm is not universal across Whitehall. The Home Office and the Treasury are unconvinced, with Treasury officials doubtful the route would do much for growth. One insider was blunter, telling the paper the plan “isn’t going anywhere.”
Not everyone in the market reads the politics as fatal. Farzin Yazdi, head of investor visa at Shard Capital, is more sanguine about the prospects. “I believe there is a 70% chance of the UK re-introducing the Investor Visa,” he says.
The design problems, to his mind, are surmountable. “There are ways to formulate a Visa that addresses concerns and has a real economic impact on the country, which is quantifiable and palatable,” he argues.
How the New Route Would Work
That £5 million figure is no accident, and it is not the old visa being brought back to life. When it launched in 2008, the Tier 1 (Investor) visa asked for £1 million, rising to £2 million by the time it closed; £5 million simply bought the fastest track to settlement, three years rather than five.
Its new design keeps that three-year timeline but makes the premium tier the entry point, deleting the cheaper options.
Qualifying capital would flow into priority parts of the economy, such as fast-growing British companies, rather than property. Excluding real estate answers the speculation that dogged the old program, where critics said the visa did more for prime London property prices than for productive investment.
The government has also signaled enhanced due diligence to distance the new route from its predecessor.
That figure is not new either. It surfaced in May, when documents describing an invite-only route reached private wealth advisers through a unit housed under 10 Downing Street. What the June meeting added was a wider audience, the critics included.
The Pushback
Anti-corruption groups arrived ready to fight. Susan Hawley of Spotlight on Corruption warned that a new investor route would be “reputationally disastrous for the UK,” and tax advisers at the table reportedly delivered the same message.
The UK closed the Tier 1 route on February 17, 2022, days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, after years of warnings that it had become a channel for corrupt wealth. By then the Home Office had granted some 2,581 investor visas to Russian nationals, on figures cited by the paper.
Whether investor visas even deliver is contested. Such programs tend to attract lifestyle migrants whose families come for the schools and the legal security, while the wealth itself stays abroad. Madeleine Sumption, who directs the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, has found that they “often fail to deliver expected economic benefits.”
Australia scrapped its equivalent, and the EU has spent years pressing members to tighten theirs. Campaigners now fear a domino effect if London reopens the door.
Not all the outside input was hostile. One think-tank close to Labour, the Institute for Public Policy Research, has worked with law firm Mishcon de Reya on a design meant to screen out the risks, with a report due soon. Steven Bostock, a partner at the firm, pointed to “consistent client desire for an investor visa since the last scheme ended.”
A Familiar Debate
This is the latest turn in an argument the UK keeps having with itself. Practitioners have spent more than four years calling the absence a policy vacuum, even as the government courts the same people through the tax code.
The UK’s non-domiciled regime ended in April 2025, replaced by a four-year Foreign Income and Gains regime for new arrivals; in November, ministers moved to fast-track settlement to three years for those earning £125,000 or more.
None of that created a dedicated path for investors, a gap this proposal would close. The exodus it would address is measurable: Abolition of the non-dom regime pushed out billionaires, including John Fredriksen, Nassef Sawiris, and Guillaume Pousaz. Nearly 11,000 millionaires left in 2024, on Henley & Partners’ count, with 16,500 more projected by the end of 2025.
For now, the proposal sits where the June meeting left it: Live enough to consult on, contested enough that one official inside government already calls it dead.
