The short version is that Barclays Eagle Labs project represented better value for the taxpayer because Barclays absorb the operational costs leaving the taxpayer's 12M to go wholly towards it's intended target. Tech Nation used some of the 12M to run it's self.
> That is absolutely wild.. 12m to a bank surely is pocket change. What possible justification did they give for that?
I'm no huge fan of Barclays bank (bad experience several decades ago, vowed to never touch them again), but they aren't "giving the money to the bank", it sounds like Barclays is taking over the contract to provide the service.
> [Barclays] will not, however, take over Tech Nation’s role administering the UK’s global talent visa. Tech Nation has notified the UK’s Home Office that its visa scheme will stop — though it will continue until then.
Kind of weird that Tech Nation is notifying the government that a visa program will stop. Does Home Office intend for another org to take over the role of administering tech applicants for the Extraordinary/Global Talent visa?
"the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) put Tech Nation’s contract up for grabs after growing concerned about its reliance on state money"[0]
"Barclays’ tech incubator Eagle Labs will use the government grant — which has been awarded for just two years — to launch new programmes to help tech companies"[1]
Q: In what sense did Tech Nation "administer" the global talent visa? It seems to be at https://www.gov.uk/global-talent - what did Tech Nation have to do with this?
When it comes to the UK, you can be sure that you will get lots of hyperbole and pretty minimal facts about this kind of thing. Not a year ago, the govt was getting criticized for creating "skilled visa schemes" for workers earning under ~£20k/year...yes, there are schemes for visas people earning over this amount too. Last year, 1m visas were awarded, this is the highest level ever.
In terms of startup funding: I believe there are now multiple multi-billion funds that are investing directly in startups, these funds even operate below the national level, Scotland has two directly run by the govt for example, local govt even has these, the govt announced today a multi-billion package for semiconductors, there are (I believe) currently three tax incentive schemes for startups.
It is important to understand that a change that is counter to this direction could just be because it is simpler to fold this kind of thing in to other services (this may just be me: I don't think having private companies involved in the visa award process is a good idea...just having Barclays do incubation is a good idea...and btw, private incubators usually have these relationships with banks too).
Of course, everything is still going to be placed within some weird narrative about "corruption" or Brexit...just UK things...
I have this visa, I've been through this process back when it was called Extraordinary Talent.
To get the visa you must first get an endorsement from a nominated organisation who's fit to judge your field (academia or research, arts and culture, or digital technology). Tech Nation did the endorsements for digital technology.
Once you have the endorsement from Tech Nation, the actual visa application done by Home Office is rather simple and is just 'rubber stamping' back in your home country.
> Tech Nation did the endorsements for digital technology
Is it possible Tech Nation were a bit too happy getting their government funding, didn't devote enough time to thinking about diversifying their income, or the "value for money for the taxpayer" angle, then were surprised when the gravy train stopped?
I did not move from the US. I initially moved to the UK on another (non-renewable) visa, and changed to Talent visa after that expired.
I enjoy living in the UK. The main thing that keeps me here is enertia - social circle and a (remote, but not async) job that I enjoy.
My initial move here was 100% a function of my age/stage in life. I do not regret moving here, and to be honest 'the current climate' doesn't really affect me that much.
I thought that was weird too, but I suppose it must basically amount to corporate sponsorship (at least as far as the Home Office is concerned) just with special status in that they promote it a bit.
I mean, this is contemporary UK politics in a nutshell. Decades of tory (and tory light) rule have gutted programs in search of short-term benefit for ages, we'll see how the country fares but it's not looking pretty.
> That is absolutely wild.. 12m to a bank surely is pocket change. What possible justification did they give for that?
“Our decision to make the Digital Growth Grant competitive brings the funding into line with the majority of government grants. Barclays Eagle Labs was successful because their application represented the best value for taxpayers’ money, will benefit the most startups and scaleups over the next two years, and was scored highest by an independent panel.”
Consider the background of 99% of his party, rather. These decisions are not taken one by one at the top. And this happened in September, under the previous cabbage.
Barclays made £7b profit last year. Nobody would be stupid enough to claim that the prime minister personally stepped in to get them another £12m (which they will have to give away in grants).
It's natural to feel fondness or bias towards one's "own" industry. They're "your" people, you know the field well and can evaluate who's genuine and who isn't. You might believe that it's a force for good in the world. You probably still have friends or professional contacts in the industry.
Yes I am pretty sure he never thought "Aha, Barclay's needs £12MM", or even noticed.
My point is that he is a perfect synecdoche for his party: reflexively help establishment business and the donor class; ignore the small stuff that could grow large. And cutting anything that encourages immigration is important to the BREXIT wing of his party (which may be all that is left of it).
Yes, that seems to have been a wrongly rewritten title. We've reverted it now. (Submitted title was "UK Tech Talent Visa to shut down after government withdraws funding".)
The terrible thing is, I think most of us in the UK expect this from the current government and there feels like there's nothing we can do to change that until next year, whilst chaos and corruption run free.
You could strike, or rather join the existing strikes. Generations of Thatcherite policies have wiped a lot of institutional memory and trained society to think of itself as being made up of investors, consumers, and drones.
It's rational for the government to just wait it out if they correctly estimate that people will just stand around passively. You have to disrupt their function; waiting for them to develop a sense of shame and see themselves out isn't going to work.
News from the UK is troubling...and intriguing. What would be the best resource to understand how the UK seems to be being sucked into the event horizon of an socio-economic blackhole of institutional collapse?
I liked the following article on the UK's terminal decline.
> There exist what I call the ‘forever problems,’ policy challenges that Britain has faced for decades, known about for decades, debated and deliberated over for decades and yet the raging, fiery injustice that these challenges promote lingers and festers. [0]
The future is bleak for Britain with it's zombie government and feckless opposition, both devoid of ideas.
Umair's writing turned more hyperbolic in proportion to the increase in the objectively observable delirium in the US and the UK. When you read his stuff, you'll see that all of his hyperbole is backed by actual, grim events. The events in the US and the UK - especially the latter - are so out of whack that how people can rationalize them and live with them boggles the mind if you are not familiar with the matter.
One major fault of Umair is that he thinks that the US and the UK and its Western European satellites are 'the world' or 'the civilization'. Hence he agitates about 'the civilization collapsing'. He misses the fact that its not the civilization collapsing - its the randian Angloamerican countries who handed over everything to private profiteers...
Never seen anything like it really. Over a £12mm handout they chopped the head off one of the most important visa endorsing bodies with no real plan to replace it. I'm sure they'll scramble to find one but the absolute madness of it absolutely reflects the entirety of what's going on in UK government at the moment.
Was anyone actually interested to go to the UK, especially post Brexit?
Here in the Bay it seems there's a constant interest from British nationals to move to America (judging by the volume of applications we get). But I've never heard anyone interested to do the reverse.
Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was... the US [0].
Yes, plenty of people. In fact, 2022 was the highest recorded immigration in history [1].
The fact remains UK has one of the best university systems and best opportunities for skilled work outside of the US. Yeah the Tory gov is trying their best to destroy the country but this kind of institutional bias is hard to wreck. It's very similar to the US - which has an amazing university system that continues to prop up the economy over the long term, despite how destructive/insane the government policies are.
I'd also argue that for lots of immigrants, things like the NHS and general safety net make the UK far more appealing than the US. Also if you're from a former British colony, it feels a lot more familiar - so you see large numbers of south/south east asian nationals who prefer to immigrate to the UK over the US.
On top of all that, it can also be significantly harder to get a visa to live in the US.
For college educated and working class South Asians, the UK isn't a top migration priority anymore. In the UK, Wages are lower, prices much higher, and immigration much harder than to Canada or even Australia.
In 80s and early 90s Punjabi movies and songs "Inglaand" may have been popular, but since the 2000s "Kaneda" has the goto choice.
Most South Asians you tend to see now are there for educational tourism and will eventually move to Canada or back to India, or are from business/political backgrounds looking for a backup passport should they be prosecuted for crimes (eg. Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Vijay Mallya), though even the US ranks higher for them but they wouldn't be allowed in the US due to background checks or past criminal records (eg. Lalit Modi's attempted stint as a coke dealer at Duke). That said, they definetly send their families to the States. For example, Amit Shah's sisters live in Schaumburg IL and Imran Khan's sis is in the Tri-Valley.
It's a lagging indicator. A lot of those South Asians tend to be 2nd or 3rd generation whose heritage is from the Doab and Mirpur who came to work in factories like the Michelin tyre factory in Southall, the Ford factory in Dagenham, and the textile mills up in Birmingham and North Yorkshire in the 1950s-70s. South Asian immigration to the UK slowed down by the 90s when America and Canada became easier for South Asians to emigrate to.
I dunno. Where my kid went to high school, "asian" usually meant people of Indian heritage. An anecdote only, but.
What pops into my mind is that the US is closer to what you would call east Asia than it is to India, and, of course, Britain has particularly strong historical ties to India/Pakistan etc. So that might also be a factor.
It feels like asylum seekers might not have the best information about the "best" place to settle, maybe they all think the UK is it, or a lot of them are going there because they have a contact (friend/relative) who can get them settled. I'd be curious to see what percentage end up where in Europe as they cross the continent, to see how many of them go all the way to Calais to try to cross to the UK.
The UK's immigration system is notoriously difficult for skilled workers to migrate under too in many, many cases so not like the UK system is setup to take advantage of this at all.
Speaking as someone with experience of both UK and US immigrant work visa systems in the software industry, the US provides significantly more visa options and paths to permanent residency, especially to folks who didn't come to the country to study first. It doesn't help matters either that in most cases equivalent software roles pay better in the US too.
The UK for years could often rely on EU migration (freedom of movement rules etc) to a large extent to provide for its migrant workforce needs. Brexit closed this avenue completely and the UK hasn't yet built an immigration system remotely appropriate for its needs to replace it, and efforts to do so are of course hugely politically contentious.
i'm sure that was Brexit. now if you earn a high wage, work for a big company that has big time lawyers. you will have your skilled visa in about 2 weeks depending on the country.
let's not start on the nightmare called h1b.
yeah current cost of living in the uk, is kinda fucked but us isn't faring better. if you only look at raw salary number then yeah US is ahead, but once you start factoring other things - uk / us are on par.
Not really sure I agree - particularly for skilled engineers. The salary gap at the mid to high-end between the UK and US is large right now, even at FAANG-grade firms. I have recent first hand experience of watching US based FAANG employees who were otherwise keen to do it turn down an offer to work in London for a year due to the drop in salary and living conditions.
The "other things" aren't what they once were either - I'd take my US private health care over the current state of the UK's NHS any day of the week right now. The wait times for even basic treatments are insane, and thats before we consider the wider state of the UK economy and public services.
> you will have your skilled visa in about 2 weeks depending on the country.
You can't really generalize like this in my experience - there are so many individual factors - just where you were born is going to affect how long your visa takes in many countries. The systems also vary enormously, from opaque hard to navigate like UK/US to open points based like Canada or Australia etc. It takes far longer than two weeks just waiting for an H1B decision result too in most cases.
A UK Tier 2 Skilled Worker visa takes 3-8 weeks to go through; the US EB-3 visa wait time is typically measured in years (more than 10 for some countries it seems).
That alone is a big reason people move to countries other than the US for tech work. An empoyer can wait a month or two for a visa to come through, they can't wait years. I'd love to work in the US, but it needs multi-year planning and for lots of stuff out of your control to line up.
Very difficult the way you’re describing it but there is an easy-ish approach: take a UK based job with an American company (e.g: Facebook) and then after you’ve worked there for a couple of years, ask to relocate to the US. There’s a special visa for that situation (L-1) which is very attainable and provides a path to citizenship.
AFAIK you need a visa first, most people I know that did this (myself included) first had a visa first: H1, L1, O1, etc. Then their employer sponsored a green card.
H1-B is the most common for tech workers, unfortunately due to quotas it can be pretty hard to get. Even if you get the job, your petition could be denied randomly because there were too many applications for the year.
IIRC L1 is not transferrable, so your best bet would be to try to snag an H1B at a different employer. It's much easier to do while in the US, so I'd ride out the L1 and apply for jobs between Nov and February to get in the H1B paperwork in for April 1st and hopefully get in the lottery. If it doesn't work on year, rinse and repeat. Depending on your occupation, O1 is a possibility, one of my friends switched jobs and went from L1 to O1.
The alternative if you're not married is to get your GC through your marriage if you have a US partner.
afaik the best approach seems to be to join a US-based company in the UK then ask them nicely to apply for a visa for you after a year. Then you're in the H1-B lottery.
That is absolutely wild.. 12m to a bank surely is pocket change. What possible justification did they give for that?
They gave the funds instead to Barclays incubator who is a for profit organization.
Meaning they will simply push and invest in what is currently making money and not unproven technologies and sciences.
This won't end well long term i feel.