§ The Minister for Citizenship and Immigration (Beverley Hughes)The Government are firmly committed to maintaining effective immigration controls while at the same time ensuring that genuine passengers are able to pass through our ports with the least possible inconvenience.
Visa regimes play an important part in the operation of our immigration controls. They allow for checks to be undertaken before a person embarks for the UK to confirm whether they qualify for admission. But we recognise that visa regimes do represent an inconvenience for some passengers and we will therefore only maintain them where the immigration threat is such as to justify doing so. At present Slovak nationals require a visa in order to visit the UK. However, we judge that there is no longer any significant threat to our immigration controls from Slovak nationals and therefore we have decided that the visa regime should be lifted and standard on-entry immigration controls will continue to be applied. Changes to the immigration rules will be made on 17 December and the visa regime will be lifted from 00.01 hours on 18 December.