The UK’s recent revised policy of the lowest pay threshold for IT workers has been strongly criticized by a country based recruitment expert.

An initiative of revising the policy came into force by the government who told the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to revamp the occupations list, which qualify for Tier 2 of the country’s points-based system. The government further ordered the MAC for offering suggestions in regard of the Codes of Practice Framework for IT workers.

The MAC was also assigned by the government for offering its views on the minimum pay for occupations and the relevant job titles. Before providing its suggestions, MAC gathered public views by conducting a great effort of public consultation in May this year.

Recruitment experts have lambasted the recommendations made by MAC targeting especially to the IT workers by saying that Migration Advisory Committee has kept together such jobs and skills in a single group that ‘a meaningless salaries packages (is)being set by UKBA. They also took on a current income threshold of £26,000 (for a programmer) that makes equivalence to a senior professional (developer) on the lowest income threshold of 37,000, which is completely unfavorable and has no relevance.  They said that if both perform similar roles then why such a huge difference in pay threshold?

Experts also criticized MAC’s recommendation that the IT directors would be fully entitled to be paid £25,300. The MAC however explored the views of recruiters who agreed that some roles like programmers, analysts, developers and software engineers are similar and can be placed in a single group. Recruitment experts, on the other hand, said if such roles are similar then why the employers advertise such roles under different (job) titles! They further objected on the minimum income threshold, which advocates that the employers must be freed from paying median earnings to those of foreign workers. Besides, the MAC has also made the recommendation in favor of keeping the minimum income threshold at 25 % of average pay.  Experts also revealed that the latest figures provided by the Higher Education Statistics denote that the computer science graduates in the UK are enough to be employed in the country.

He said that the UK has become the most prominent and reliant destination for foreign companies who hire their own staff for supporting their operations and functions. Now the time has arrived to reduce this.