Employing skilled employees who are situated abroad or in the UK requires a sponsorship license (formerly known as a Tier 2 sponsorship license); candidates can “transfer” into the Skilled Worker visa from most other visa categories, such as the Tier 4 Student and Tier 2 visas. An organization may sponsor employees for its company with the authorization of the sponsorship license. Licensed “sponsors” must be organizations; people are not permitted. To stop illicit employment and the abuse of the immigration system, the Home Office depends on the sponsoring system.
Your organization must be legally established or transact in the UK to qualify to petition for a sponsor license. If you have several UK branches, you can apply for a single license to cover all of your connected UK companies, or, based on your situation, you can apply for individual licences for each branch.
Another option is to sponsor a foreign worker through the Intra-Company Graduate Trainee program. This path is intended for people moving to the UK in conjunction with the graduate studies program to prepare for management or specialized position. The UK starting salary must be at least $23,000 per year, and the apprentice must have worked for the foreign business for a minimum of three months before the application deadline.
Obtaining a Sponsor License is a strict legal requirement for any business wanting to hire skilled foreign workers. Such acts could result in incarceration or deportation for the worker and sanctions for the company that hired them. This is why if you are a sponsor, having a US immigration lawyer is a must.
Do you need to wait to submit a Sponsor Licence application?
While processing times may appear lengthy, all indications point to a recent trend of relatively high numbers continuing. Therefore, it is doubtful that timeframes will reduce considerably any time soon.
You are strongly advised to register as early as possible if you require a Sponsor Licence and may anticipate needing one in the upcoming year.
If all your requirements are complete, applying for the Sponsor Licence as soon as possible is an excellent option to receive the decision and approval sooner. Applications for sponsor licenses may be processed in up to 8 weeks. If there are problems with the documentation and supporting materials that have been supplied, approval may take much longer.
Even if you aren’t currently in a situation to sponsor immigrants underneath the present structure or are unsure whether or not you will be required to sponsor immigrants underneath the new system starting in January 2021, you are urged to apply as soon as possible. In such circumstances, if you satisfy all other guidelines, we may offer you a license. However, we will not yet assign you any CoS. You can ask for the necessary number of CoS once you know that you will be required to hire migrant workers.
Processing periods for Sponsor Licenses
According to the Home Office, it typically takes roughly eight weeks from the moment the registration is submitted to complete a Sponsor Licence application. Nevertheless, it takes a bit of time from the day a UK firm decides to obtain a Sponsor Licence until the company is prepared to file its Sponsor Licence petition, according to to sponsor license solicitors. This lengthens the duration it takes to obtain a Sponsor Licence altogether.
Businesses should resist the temptation to hire immigrant labour before obtaining a Sponsor Licence because doing so would violate immigration laws. If immigration laws are broken, it will affect the firm’s growth ability to acquire a Sponsor License.
What follows the processing of a Sponsor Licence?
After a license is issued, an electronic record called a Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) is created on the Sponsor Management System (SMS).
The business should send a text message to the Home Office asking for a Certificate of Sponsorship before it may support a migrant worker. Once authorized, the business must assign it to the immigrant worker they wish to sponsor to create a unique reference number that the applicant can use when submitting their work permit.
Once Home Office has granted your company a sponsor license, you cannot immediately hire an international employee without following the proper administrative procedure. To begin with, your business must assign a Certificate of Sponsorship to the new hire and pay the outstanding payments.
The approved, potential employee can then submit an application to the Home Office for their skilled worker visa when the Certificate of Sponsorship has been assigned. The foreign worker cannot begin working until their work visa application is granted and their right to employment has been verified.
