Chris Gaynor

Trainee Indian doctors can now work in the UK after Britain's highest court ruled they should be given the same opportunity as general practitioners from the European Union, according to the Migration Expert website.

The news comes as the Home Office bizarrely ruled in 2006 that UK hospitals should not employ a non-EU candidate unless there was no candidate in the frame for a job from the EU.

But the House of Lords held that the then Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, acted unfairly in "dashing the legitimate expectations" of practitioners who had been encouraged to come to this country to help staff the NHS.

''We think this is a landmark victory for doctors from the Indian sub-continent, " said Dr Ramesh Mehta, President of British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO).

He added: “The House of Lords has vindicated our position that the Government had acted in haste and prematurely without thinking through the damaging consequences for thousands of international medical graduates that it’s retrospectively applied unfair regulations were likely to impose.”

"We are absolutely delighted and we believe justice has been done."

The new ruling will affect between 8,000 and 10,000 Indians currently in the UK on Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP) Working visas given before April 2006.

"The Committee concludes that the changes to the HSMP are clearly not compatible with the right to respect for home and family life under Article 8 ECHR (European Convention of Human Rights) and contrary to basic notions of fairness," said the committee.

They said that the changes made in April 2006 to the UK immigration rules should be amended so that they apply only prospectively, that is to future applicants wanting to work in the UK on the HSMP visa.

Another recommendation was that those already granted leave to remain under the HSMP visa when the relevant changes took effect, should be treated according to the rules which applied before those changes.

Under the HSMP visa, the basic requirement is that you score a minimum of 75 points on the HSMP points test says the website.

After five years, an employed resident can then gain citizenship.

In the past few days, a report has said that migration to the UK is highly beneficial.

Britain has seen both its inflation and interest rates lowered, said the report published by city-based think tank, The Work Foundation.

"On the available evidence... with the UK's ageing population, with fewer young people entering the job market, means that a fair and flexible policy of managed migration is essential if the economy is to continue to grow," said David Coats, the foundation's associate director of policy and also author of the report.

Coats added: "The high water mark may have been passed and employers cannot rely on a continued supply of Polish workers to fill labour shortages in the UK,

"As the economies of central and Eastern Europe grow and unemployment falls, the pressure to migrate will lessen."

* Government handling of the British junior doctors recruitment crisis last year was inept, MPs say.The House of Commons' health committee said the government had provided "inadequate leadership" amid the chaos which saw medics take to the streets.But they also blamed doctors, saying they were more concerned with factional interests than the common good.

The government said it would consider the findings and pointed out it had already apologised for the problems, like an online application form which has now been scrapped.The row, which led to protests outside parliament and a legal challenge by doctors, came after the government tried to streamline doctor training, while introducing a new applications system on the net.

The cross-party group of MPs said there had been inappropriate governance, management and communication by the Department of Health, while chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson had failed to take responsibility despite being the architect of the reforms.

One of the reasons why there was such intense competition last year was that UK-trained medics, which have increased in number, had been competing for posts with foreign doctors.Doctors from abroad have been encouraged to work in the NHS in recent years to plug the gaps in the service while UK-based students were trained in medical schools.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious [1] | digg [2] | reddit [3] | newsvine [4] | furl [5] | google [6] | yahoo [7] | technorati [8] | icerocket [9]