Sponsorship Licence: Duties and Compliance For Employers

To comply with Immigration Law, you must ensure that you are ‘genuine’ in your position as an employer of overseas nationals. This is to avoid potential candidates from ‘circumventing’ the immigration rules and facilitating entry to the UK.

As a part of this duty, you must ensure sponsored workers are appropriately qualified, registered or experienced to do the job you are offering them. For example, if you sponsor a doctor, you must make sure they have the correct registration that allows them to practise legally in the UK.

You must also ensure that you issue the correct type of certificate of sponsorship, depending upon which route the worker is applying under and where they are applying from. Also, you must try and provide an accurate duration of the employment, from the outset.

There are many possibilities in which you can be deemed as being non-compliant with Immigration Laws. For example, not carrying out the appropriate checks, or failing to disclose important information relating to the sponsored worker.

Ultimately, the Home Office must be convinced that you are sponsoring workers to fill ‘genuine vacancies’. A genuine vacancy is one which:

requires the jobholder to perform the specific duties and responsibilities for the job and meets all of the requirements of the relevant route;
does not include dissimilar and/or predominantly lower-skilled duties;
is appropriate to the business in light of its business model, business plan and scale.

Where there are doubts, the Home Office will request additional information and/or evidence from you or the worker, to establish whether the requirement has been met. The Home Office will refuse the worker’s application if the correct or sufficient information is not provided, or it is not provided within the deadline.

Complying with wider UK law

You also have a duty to comply with wider UK law, other than immigration law and this includes, but is not limited to, the following:

complying with UK employment law, for example National Minimum Wage, Workplace pension schemes and/or Working Time Regulations;
complying with illegal working and right-to-rent legislation;
holding suitable planning permission, local planning authority consent or any legally required licence registration or approval to run your type of business at your trading address;
ensuring you are registered with the appropriate body, where it is a legal requirement in the UK;
only employing worker who have a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check, where this is a requirement for the role;
complying with requirements on safeguarding children;
not engaging in any criminal activity;
not being subject to UK or UN imposed sanctions;
paying VAT or other duty penalties.

Behaviour that is not conducive to the public good

The Home Office will not licence organisations whose actions and behaviour are non-conducive to the public good. Such actions and behaviour include but are not limited to:

fostering hatred or inter-community division;
fomenting, justifying or glorifying terrorism;
rejecting the rights of, or discriminating against, other groups or individuals on the basis of their sex, age, disability, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital or civil partnership status, race, or religion or belief (including lack of belief).

The Home Office will refuse a sponsor licence application or take the appropriate compliance actions if a prospective or existing sponsor is engaging, or has ever engaged, in such behaviour or actions.

To avoid sanctions and remain compliant with all of the duties mentioned above, at all times during the life of your sponsorship licence, you are strongly recommended in using our retainer service.

With this type of bespoke package, we will always be at hand to answer any questions you may have, and we will do so within an agreed time. We will set out in writing, from the outset, what our retainer service includes and what it does not.

For further support and/or guidance with remaining compliant throughout the life of your sponsorship licence, please contact our Corporate Immigration team today.

Table of Contents

Complying with immigration laws

Complying with wider UK law

Behaviour that is not conducive to the public good

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