What we know so far
With little official guidance for the final “Sponsor UK” product, the Government Authorised Exchange (GAE) Scheme guidance gives us some critical clues to how the new system will operate. The Sponsor UK scheme is being piloted through the GAE route and here is a summary of what we have gleaned so far.
User Access
Sponsor UK account users will be broadly equivalent to Level 1 and 2 Users in a sponsor’s existing SMS account, but with some important differences.
Within the pilot scheme, only the following licence ‘Key Personnel’ have been invited to register as Sponsor UK users:
- Level 1 Users
- Key Contact
- Authorising Officer
These personnel must also work for the business (i.e. do not include legal representatives) for the time being.
Account users will be able to:
- make, edit or withdraw a sponsorship submission
- pay for a sponsorship submission
- report worker change of circumstances
- upload evidence
- view role details
- view recent activity on your licence
- view your organisation and licence details
The ability to upload evidence is a key change in the sponsorship system – SMS currently allows very little data (and no documents) to be posted when making applications or reports.
Sponsorship requests
The Home Office will grant sponsorship requests individually – and all the details (including candidate details) are required for the request.
It is unclear how long the Home Office will take to process sponsorship applications under the new system, but we know now that, if approved, payment links should be issued within 5 working days of a decision.
This could add a layer of complexity, especially for larger sponsors who may normally request 5, 10, 50, 100 + “CoS” in any given year (depending on the company size) to assign at will.
Reporting
Sponsors will continue to report migrant activity using the portal.
Existing Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS) may be transferred over to the new system so that you can continue to report against CoS you assigned before the changeover (i.e. report on your current sponsored workers).
Process
As above, sponsors will not make sponsorship applications in bulk. Instead, regardless of whether the candidate is based inside or outside the UK, you will follow a new process to sponsor a worker on an individual basis:
- Sponsor: Completes a ‘sponsor form’ (i.e. equivalent to the current “CoS” )
- Home Office: Decides your sponsorship request
- Sponsor: Pays the sponsorship fee (within 90 days of approval). The fee is likely to be £525 per application, plus the immigration skills charge, where applicable.
- Home Office: Accepts the fee and sends Sponsor a sponsorship reference number
- Sponsor: ‘Invites’ the worker to apply for their visa by sending them the sponsorship number
- Worker: Must apply for their visa within 90 days of the sponsorship reference number being issued (pays for their visa fee (and immigration health surcharge)).
- Home Office: Informs both the sponsor and worker of the decision. Visa applications are likely to continue to take 3 weeks to be decided where submitted overseas and 8 weeks inside the UK (with priority services available).
The Home Office will exercise more control over sponsors, with the new system facilitating the close monitoring, review and approval of sponsorship applications on a case-by-case basis – and all this before the applicant has even made a visa application.
We believe that the Home Office’s ultimate aim is to make the interface easy and intuitive to use so that sponsors will be encouraged to manage their own online system with less help from legal representatives. End-to-end, the sponsorship-to-visa process should be more cohesive. Radical improvements to the sponsorship process were also an objective of the previous (Conservative) government, as outlined in the (now archived) ‘Sponsorship Roadmap’.
Despite plans to make the Sponsor UK system procedurally easier, sponsorship applications can be intrinsically complex, and the Home Office’s scrutiny of applications is only getting more intense. Sponsors should continue to seek advice and support to maintain compliance with visa-specific rules and to comply with general ‘Sponsor duties’ (rules and regulations).
Sponsors can continue to use the current SMS system until “Sponsor UK” is rolled out to all users. Stay tuned for more updates on when the new Sponsor UK system will be ready for use by all.
