There are clear duties and responsibilities that come with being a Sponsor Licence holder. This blog touches on your responsibilities and explains when they begin and end both for Sponsors and Sponsor Licence holders alike.
Being aware of the timeline of your sponsor duties is an important part of ensuring that you are fully complying with your role requirements and responsibilities.
What are your duties?
Reporting on certain events or information, such as change of circumstances of your workers and your organisation within certain time limits via the Sponsor Management System (SMS).
- Keeping a record of certain documents for sponsored workers, such as their right-to-work, salary and skill level information.
- Complying with UK law, both immigration and wider.
- Not engaging in behaviour that is inconsistent with the public good. This could include fostering hatred, justifying terrorism or discriminating against groups or individuals on the basis of their protected characteristics.
Your duties as a Sponsor Licence holder start on the day your licence is granted and end when you surrender it, it is revoked or becomes inactive. These duties apply equally to long and short-term visas. Your responsibility to individual workers starts on the day a Certificate of Sponsorship is assigned to them and ends when:
- Their permission expires or lapses.
- Their application is refused or cancelled, and review rights have been exhausted.
- The worker is granted permission to work for a different sponsor.
- The worker is granted permission to stay on a different route that no longer requires you to sponsor them.
- You report to the Home Office that you are no longer sponsoring them.
Consequences
The Home Office may conduct compliance visits. Any concerns that you are not meeting your obligations may result in your licence being downgraded, suspended or revoked.
You can find more information about your duties to workers on specific visas, as well as more detailed information about your duties as a licence holder, on the UK Government website. If you have any questions about the information presented in this blog, please seek advice from a specialist immigration adviser.
How Gherson can assist
Gherson’s Immigration Team are highly experienced in advising on UK visa matters. If you have any questions arising from this blog, please do not hesitate to contact us for advice, send us an e-mail, or, alternatively, follow us on X, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn to stay-up-to-date.
The information in this blog is for general information purposes only and does not purport to be comprehensive or to provide legal advice. Whilst every effort is made to ensure the information and law is current as of the date of publication it should be stressed that, due to the passage of time, this does not necessarily reflect the present legal position. Gherson accepts no responsibility for loss which may arise from accessing or reliance on information contained in this blog. For formal advice on the current law please do not hesitate to contact Gherson. Legal advice is only provided pursuant to a written agreement, identified as such, and signed by the client and by or on behalf of Gherson.
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