The UK Government has said that a new immigration system will be ready in January 2021, following the end of the current transitional period negotiated with the EU.
Will it just be a matter of extending the existing arrangements for non-EU nationals to all migrants? Or will the Government be able to keep its promise to establish "a new Australian-style points-based immigration system” which would enable it to deliver “a single global immigration system based on people's skills”?
To assess what this promise is likely to mean in practice, our Head of Immigration Alex Russell has teamed up with Kristopher Kunasingam, Head of Migration at Australian firm Hall & Wilcox. Their joint article starts with a quick reminder of the UK's current immigration arrangements for EU nationals and then explains how the Australian system operates in practice. It concludes by assessing what could happen next in the UK, taking into account last week's report from the Migration Advisory Committee.