Valued doctor ‘will be forced to leave UK’ after autistic daughter refused visa

An experienced and highly regarded doctor who is working at a GP surgery in east London says he has no choice but to walk away from his job because the Home Office is separating him from his wife and autistic daughter.

Tajwer Siddiqui says he has found himself in this situation at a time when the number of full-time GPs in the UK is falling .

The 59-year-old doctor has worked in medicine for decades in his home country of Pakistan and in Saudi Arabia. He successfully applied to the Home Office for a highly skilled worker visa to take up a position at an NHS GP surgery in Ilford, east London, called Doctor’s House.

The surgery is sponsoring his visa and he began working there on 1 July 2024, as a GP assistant until he completes an exam called PLAB – Professional Linguistics Assessment Board test – that all overseas-qualified doctors must take before they can start to practise as a doctor in the UK.

His wife, Shehlar Tajwer, 50, is also a qualified family doctor who hopes to work as a doctor in the UK. She too was granted a visa to come and work here as a dependant of her husband.

The couple have a 19-year-old daughter, Alina Tajwer Siddiqui, who cannot live independently due to her autism and needs her parents and other family members to care for her.

However, the Home Office has refused her a visa to come to the UK saying that her parents have not demonstrated “compassionate or compelling circumstances” that would justify officials granting her permission to live with her parents in the UK, in what is known as a grant of leave outside the rules.

Earlier this year the previous government tightened up the rules for health and care workers and international students, who were previously allowed to bring relatives to the UK when they secured a job here. This change in the rules led to a decrease in these applications by about one-third.

While Tajwer Siddiqui was granted a visa under the highly skilled migrant route, which is supposed to allow dependants, the decision to bar the autistic teenager shows a hardening of decisions about healthcare workers being allowed to bring family members more broadly.

Ikram Khan, the practice business manager at Doctor’s House surgery, described the Home Office’s decision as lacking in compassion.

Siddiqui’s wife must travel to the UK before the end of this month or her visa will lapse. She is planning to travel to the UK for a couple of weeks, leaving Alina in Pakistan with her grandmother, but she says this is not a suitable long-term arrangement.

“If the Home Office do not allow Alina to come to the UK I will have no choice but to leave my job at the surgery here and go back to Pakistan so I can be with my wife and my daughter. All three of us need to be together so we can look after Alina. She cannot look after herself,” said Siddiqui.

Khan said because of Siddiqui’s ability as a doctor and huge amount of experience he had proved to be a big asset for patients.

“The amount of service Tajwer has been able to provide for our patients has just been incredible. We don’t want to lose him. It would have a terrible impact on the surgery. He is a great asset to the team. But this family cannot be separated. If Tajwer is forced to leave his job here and go back to Pakistan it will be a lose-lose situation for everyone. I understand that ministers want to reduce migration but we thought the new government would be more compassionate than the previous one.”

The family initially submitted 28 pieces of supporting medical evidence of Alina’s autism and related conditions, and her reliance on her parents, and were then asked to submit more information and provided another 12 documents providing information about Alina’s condition.

The reports submitted span a 12-year period from 2012 until 2024.

Home Office officials picked out one sentence in one of the medical reports, which stated: “You have excellent management of her activities of daily life,” while not referencing in their decision another sentence that said: “She has dependency on her parents for good and effective quality of life.”

The Home Office official said that because Alina is over 18 she is not being granted permission to come to the UK as a dependant of her parents.

The official said that as well as not meeting the “compassionate and compelling grounds” test they did not believe that the decision to separate Alina from her parents met the “unjustifiably harsh consequences” threshold for Alina or her family.

Siddiqui said: “I’m completely preoccupied by the situation with the visa and am in limbo at the moment. Alina cannot go out by herself and psychologically she is very attached to us. We haven’t had the courage to tell her her visa has been refused so we’ve told her we’re still waiting for a decision.”

The Home Office has been approached for comment.