The United Kingdom Home Office has announced the abolishment of renewing sponsor licences every four years and this has brought a huge boost in morale to UK employers.
With this news, it means there will be less paperwork for employers and less payments in renewals made to retain workers.
According to the UK Visas and Immigration information on gov.uk, the UK sponsor licence was a must for people who want to employ someone from outside the UK, including citizens of EU member countries, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland who arrived in the UK after December 31, 2020.
Education providers, too, needed a sponsor licence to get overseas students and faculty into the UK.
What the new rule says:
Effectively from April 6 2024, required sponsor licenses to be renewed every four years will no longer exist.
With this, sponsor licenses expiring will be automatically extended by ten years, eliminating the need for renewals altogether.
Sponsors holding valid licenses within this timeframe are not required to take any action – their licenses are automatically covered by the extension.
How The Old Rule Was Applied:
Businesses that sponsored licenses are to first submit applications 90 days before they expired and are required to pay hefty fee between £536 and £1,476 depending on their size and charity status.
The processing times for renewals could also stretch up to eight weeks.
Going forward…
The UK Home Office will now have to refund the application fees to sponsors in the renewal process while urging them to verify their license expiry through the online Sponsorship Management System (SMS). Also, sponsors who have already initiated the renewal process are now contacted on the news.
Recall that the UK government in the process of controlling net immigration to the country has in December 2023 announced plans to increasing the cost of hiring overseas personnel and gas also increased the cost of visa applications even pegging salary threshold to certain amount before switching and/or applying for new visas.
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