Freedom of Information
Central Correspondence Team
Customer Operations Support
Services
PO Box 3468
Sheffield
S3 8WA
Michael Ratcliffe
request-1126013-c55c815d@
Email:
whatdotheyknow.com
xxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx
www.gov.uk/ukvi
FOI Reference: FOI2024/04251
30 May 2024
Dear Mr Ratcliffe
Thank you for your enquiry of 30 April. Your request has been handled as a request
for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
Information Requested
Can you tell me how many people have been granted high potential individual visas
under the scheme that admits graduates from top 50 universities? I would like to
know how many visas have been granted to each of the years of graduates allowed
under the scheme - such that graduates from 2016 are eligible if under one list of
universities, 2017 under another list. I would also like to know which universities the
people had graduated from (that being the eligibility criterion). If the data is too
small, knowing the countries of the universities that the people had graduated from
would be helpful.
Response
Under Section 12(1) of the FOIA, the Home Office is not obliged to comply with an
information request where to do so would exceed the appropriate limit.
The cost of locating and collating any relevant information and extracting the
information to meet your request would exceed the appropriate limit of £600
specified in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and
Fees) Regulations 2004. The £600 limit is based on work being carried out at a rate
of £25 per hour, which equates to 24 hours of work per request.
UK Visas and Immigration is an operational command of the Home Office
Please note, we are unable to provide details of which universities each applicant
attended. We do not capture the level of information required to address the points
raised in your request in a readily reportable format; therefore, to extract this data,
we would need to investigate each application manually.
If you were to resubmit a more specific request of narrower scope then we would
reconsider it, although we cannot guarantee that any information covered by a
narrower request would be disclosed.
If you refine your request, reducing the amount of information you ask for, we will
consider it again. However, any request involving a significant amount of manual
searching is likely to exceed the cost limit for the reasons explained in this letter.
It might be of further interest to you that the Home Office publishes data on visas in
the
‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on the grants of High
Potential Individual (HPI) visas are published in the table ‘Vis_D02’ of the
detailed
entry clearance visas dataset. Information on how to use the dataset can be found in
the ‘Notes’ page of the workbook. The latest data relates up to the end of March
2024.
Information on future Home Office statistical release dates can be found in the
‘Research and statistics calendar’. As the High Potential Individual (HPI) visa was only introduced in 2022, the only
published figures are for 2022 and 2023.
If you are dissatisfied with this response, you may request an independent internal
review of our handling of your request by submitting a complaint within two months
to
xxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx, quoting reference
FOI2024/04251. If you ask for
an internal review, it would be helpful if you could say why you are dissatisfied with
the response.
As part of any internal review the Department's handling of your information request
will be reassessed by staff not involved in providing you with this response. If you
remain dissatisfied after this internal review, you will have a right of complaint to the
Information Commissioner as established by section 50 of the Freedom of
Information Act.
A link to the Home Office Information Rights Privacy Notice can be found in the
following link. This explains how we process your personal information:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/information-rights-privacy-notice
Yours sincerely
J Ogburn
Customer Operations Support Services
We value your feedback, please use the link below to access a brief anonymous
survey to help us improve our service to you:
http://www.homeofficesurveys.homeoffice.gov.uk/s/108105TAZNG
