‘I’m separated from my one-year-old son due to Home Office visa rule
Leighton Allen was just a month away from being able to bring his baby and partner to the UK – until the rules suddenly changed
Leighton Allen can only see his one-year-old son once a year, twice if he’s lucky.
Baby Myles lives with his mother in Tanzania, and due to the infrequency of their visits, sometimes mistakenly calls Leighton “uncle”.
Leighton, 29, and his son are separated by thousands of miles – and a Home Office policy he argues is unfair.
They are among thousands of families separated due to an increase in the minimum salary Britons must be earning to bring a loved one from overseas, which was increased from £18,600 to £29,000 last April.
In a Commons debate this week, several Labour MPs urged the Government not to go ahead with a proposed further increase to £38,700.
Leighton met his partner, Sophie, through friends in her native Tanzania in 2022, where he was studying Swahili. After three months together, Sophie became pregnant.
“I thought, okay, I’m no longer here to learn the language. I need to earn some money,” he says, from his home in Worcester.
As Sophie’s pregnancy progressed, Leighton returned to the UK and scrambled to get a job, while planning for Sophie and their baby to join him.

“I was doing night shifts, and I was set to be over the amount needed, on about £20,000 or £21,000,” he said.
But just a month before he would have had the number of payslips necessary to apply for Sophie’s visa, in April 2024, the Tory government changed the rules, raising the minimum income and making Leighton ineligible.
“It was agonising,” he said. “It feels like they’re putting a price on love.
“If I had hundreds of thousands, or was a millionaire, I could marry Sophie and she’d be here now. My salary is supposed to be a liveable wage for a British family, but isn’t for a foreign one.
“It doesn’t make sense to me, because we’d pay more money into the UK if she was here,” he added.
What are minimum income requirements?
Rules stipulating that a UK citizen must earn a certain amount to bring over a foreign spouse were first introduced by the coalition government in 2015, as part of a raft of changes designed to reduce net migration.
The number of people separated by the rule is not clear, but Oxford’s Migration Observatory suggests it could be in the tens of thousands.
Until last year, the minimum income requirement (MIR) stood at £18,600 a year – the minimum salary level in the UK.
In April 2024, the Conservative government raised this to £29,000, and announced plans to increase it again to £34,000 later in 2024, and then to around £38,700 in early 2025.
The government said this was to ensure that families could support themselves without becoming a burden to the taxpayer, and to reduce net migration.
There can be some flexibility in exceptional circumstances if a visa refusal would breach the couple’s human rights.
However, critics argue the MIR disproportionately hits poorer families.
Roughly half of employees in the UK earn less than £29,000 per year, according to a parliamentary research briefing on the issue.
The new Labour Government froze any further rises above £29,000 and commissioned a review of the MIR rules in September 2024, looking at financial requirements across family immigration routes to ensure a “clear and consistent” system.
The i Paper understands there are no plans to change the current threshold of £29,000 until the review is complete.
Staying in Tanzania wasn’t an option either. Under Tanzanian laws, men can bring a foreign spouse to the country if they provide a marriage certificate to immigration authorities – Tanzanian women cannot, unless their spouse has a work visa.
Even if he could find work there, Leighton says the salary he made working in retail in the UK would vastly exceed the salary of a doctor in Tanzania.
Myles was born in April 2023 in Tanzania, with both parents by his side. Leighton has also become a stepfather to Sophie’s 10-year-old son, Alex.
“There was no way we could be together,” he adds. The pair have been forced to live apart ever since.
As well as missing them painfully, Leighton worries deeply about the impact it will have on his son and their relationship.
“I speak to him daily, I’m always on the phone, but sometimes he calls me uncle,” he says.
Children ‘not sleeping’ over rules
Alex and Myles are by no means the only children affected by the MIR policy.
In 2015 – three years after the MIR introduction – a report for the Children’s Commissioner for England estimated that 15,000 children had already been separated from one of their parents as a result of the rules.
Reunite Families argue this figure will have exponentially increased.
New research carried out by Reunite Families and the Coram Centre for Impact found children – aged seven to 16 – affected by the policy suffering stress, uncertainty and anxiety, manifesting in sleep disturbances and even selective mutism in some children.
“It was worrying to me that like I didn’t know how dad was doing or how he was feeling or coping with it [separation in another country, living alone],” one child told researchers.
One young person said they daydreamed at school about what they could do to make things easier on their parents.
“I think the sort of added stress of that [family situation] kind of made my anxiety during that time a lot worse,” they said.
Phone calls could also be difficult because of the time differences.
“It didn’t feel the same as him actually being there and being able to talk to him,” one of the children said of speaking to their parent on a video call.
Reunite Families said some children also struggled with a sense of identity, from not sharing a language with one of their parents or be able to visit the country they have heritage.
‘Nobody benefits’ from policy, critics argue
Critics have welcomed the Labour-led review of the MIRs.
Professor Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King’s College London and a Coram trustee, said research highlights the “broader economic and social costs of the minimum income requirement.”
“Nobody – not the government, not taxpayers and certainly not children – gains from children growing up divided from one of their parents,” he said.
Caroline Coombs, executive director and co-founder of Reunite Families UK, said children were the “hidden victims” of what she described as “cruel immigration policies”.
“Children’s rights must not be ridden roughshod over just because one of their parents is not British,” she said.
Zoe Bantleman, legal director of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, urged the Migration Advisory Committee to “listen to their concerns and make recommendations that would assist the Government to uphold the international rule of law, by respecting private and family life and taking the best interests of children as a primary consideration”.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Migration Advisory Committee [an independent body] is reviewing the requirement regarding the minimum income requirement for family visas and will report back in due course.
“In cases where refusing a visa would cause unfair or harsh outcomes for the applicant or their family, permission can still be granted based on exceptional circumstances, taking into account the impact on any children and considering their best interests.”