We closed the door on foreign investors in February 2022 and told ourselves it was a win against dirty money. Four years on, what we actually got was an exodus of wealth and corporations leaving the UK — and a government still pretending it doesn't understand why the economy feels this hollow.

Here's what nobody in Whitehall wants to say out loud: when a wealthy family leaves Britain, it isn't just a headline about "non-doms." It's a family that stops shopping on the high street, stops eating in our restaurants, stops buying luxury cars, stops paying for private schools, private healthcare, stops going to our salons or doing home renovations, and everything else that ripples through an economy. We made it unattractive to be wealthy here, and then acted surprised when wealth left.

Meanwhile, we've built one of the most porous benefits systems in Europe — with no unified cross-border checking system to catch people claiming support in the UK and in the EU simultaneously.

We've made it harder to bring in people who invest in our country and contribute to our economy and easier for people to sit back quietly and claim benefits without scrutiny. That is a policy failure, not a coincidence.

The Old Visa Wasn't the Problem. The Checks Were.

The usual defence of scrapping the Tier 1 Investor visa is that it let "black money" into Britain. But that's a lazy conclusion brought on by public scrutiny of a certain London football club owner who shall not be named. The route wasn't inherently corrupt — it was badly policed and we gained nothing while the Applicant made a meagre return on their capital. Applicants largely had to show funds had sat in an account for a period of time and give a loose explanation of where the money came from. There was no rigorous background-check regime behind it.

Compare that to the Caribbean Citizenship-by-Investment programmes, which built in exactly what Britain didn't: full background checks, due diligence on the applicant's history, and real scrutiny before anyone is even eligible to apply. If a handful of small island nations can build that level of screening, there is no serious excuse for the UK — with vastly more resources — failing to do the same. The lesson from 2022 was never "stop the visa." It was "fix the vetting” and make the investment more beneficial to our economy. We threw out the entire route instead of fixing the parts that were broken.

New Proposal Is Solving the Wrong Problem

The government is now reportedly weighing a new £5 million, invite-only investor route with enhanced vetting and a three-year path to residency — a tacit admission that shutting the old scheme cost us something. But from what's emerged so far, the focus seems to be on how to make the route more exclusive and prolong the path to residency, rather than on how to make sure the investment actually benefits the country.

That's backwards. The real question isn't "how do we keep people waiting longer." It's "how do we direct this money somewhere useful." We could build routes that channel investment into social enterprise schemes, the way parts of Europe already do. We could direct capital into deprived regions of the UK, or into reviving our high streets. The Caribbean CBI model runs on a non-refundable donation — so why not a British golden visa on similar lines: a fixed-term residency, say ten years, renewable with a further donation that goes straight into public investment? It isn't a complicated idea. It shouldn't need endless rounds of policy advisers to arrive at it.

We Can't Have It Both Ways

Right now the government is trying to ease the cost-of-living squeeze, while the opposition and commentators ask, reasonably, how any tax cuts get paid for without blowing a hole in revenue. But that's a hole of the government's own making.

I've been told first-hand that cuts to university budgets have pushed many classes online rather than in person. What few people realise is that dependants of Tier 1 Investor and Tier 1 Entrepreneur visa holders were paying international fees, not home fees, to study at UK universities. Combined with the drop in international student numbers following changes to dependant visa rules, this means home students — who have taken on substantial student loans, or drawn on family savings or their own money — are now often left with little more than an online course, something they could have accessed for a fraction of the cost.

We turned away the very capital that used to help fund the country, and now we're short of money to help the people living in it. At the same time, ministers such as the ex-Chancellor Rachael Reeves flew to China to court investment for Britain, showing they're perfectly willing to lean on foreign capital when it's convenient — just apparently not when that capital wants to bring itself, and its owners, here permanently. Nobody domestically has the appetite or the funds to invest at this scale. If we won't accept it from individuals prepared to relocate and spend here, and we go looking for it from abroad anyway, we should ask what exactly we think we're protecting.

Britain needs the investor visa back — not the old, badly-checked version, and not a new version designed mainly to look tough. A version built to screen out bad actors properly, and built to put the money to work in the country that's letting people in.