UK businesses need to obtain a sponsor licence to hire skilled workers for their company. To scale up your UK business, it is essential to onboard highly skilled professionals for your business from all around the world.
To hire overseas talents, it is essential that you must have this licence. Without this licence, you won’t be able to hire migrant workers for your business. However, this licence comes with immense responsibilities and duties. A licence holder must fulfil the responsibilities associated with this licence. Non-compliance and not fulfilling your duties can lead to sponsor licence suspension. Suspension can be a devastating experience for employers and for employees both. As an employer, you won’t hire migrant workers for your UK business, even if your existing employees will also not be able to work with you after a certain period of time.
As a UK Sponsor licence holder, you will be required to maintain compliance to avoid suspension of your licence. There is no way out apart from fulfilling your duties and staying compliant with UK immigration rules and regulations. As a new sponsor licence holder, you may require professional help from immigration lawyers UK. Their assistance can help you stay compliant with your sponsor duties. In this comprehensive article, we have discussed several checklists to maintain compliance to avoid suspension of the sponsor licence.
On Which Grounds Does Your Licence Get Suspended?
Believe it or not, it is essential to understand the reasons behind sponsor licence suspension. Before you know about a comprehensive checklist to avoid suspension, it is essential to know the grounds for suspension. First of all, you need to understand your responsibilities as a sponsor. The UK Home Office can suspend your licence if you fail to comply with your duties. A sponsor’s duty is to keep records of their migrant workers. Record keeping involves keeping contact details, residential addresses, immigration status, passport details, and other relevant information about your migrant workers. Apart from this, there should be a robust human resource system in place to fulfil all your obligations related to sponsor duties. The Home Office runs compliance visits, and during this visit, if they find that you are lacking in fulfilling your sponsor duties, they can suspend your licence with immediate effect. In our next section, we will discuss several responsibilities of a sponsor licence holder.
Must Fulfil These Sponsor Licence Duties
If you are a sponsor licence holder, you must fulfil your duties as designed by the UK visas and immigration. Here in this section, we have mentioned some of the responsibilities that are essential to fulfil a sponsor licence holder. Go through this comprehensive checklist to understand your duties and responsibilities.
- As a sponsor, you need to maintain records of your migrant workers, such as their contact details, passport details, residential address, daily attendance, qualification certificates, etc.
- If an employee doesn’t show up to work for more than ten days, you must inform the Home Office. You can inform them through the sponsor management system and can revoke your sponsorship.
- It’s the sponsor’s duty to inform the Home Office about changes in employees’ salaries, job location, and job duties. There must be an employee handbook to maintain the daily attendance of your migrant workers.
- Before hiring a migrant worker, it is essential for a UK employer to check their rights to work in the United Kingdom. Migrant workers must have the right to work in the UK to work with a UK employer. Hiring illegal workers can put you in a difficult situation, and you may have to experience several consequences.
- As per the UK government’s rules and regulations, you must provide genuine salaries to your employees. Their working hours should be defined well, and they must be provided with health benefits.
- The Home Office can conduct a compliance visit anytime without informing you. You must be prepared for such unwanted situations and assign a key personnel to handle all the compliance visits.
- You must provide correct and accurate information to the Home Office about your company and migrant workers. Inaccuracy in information also becomes a major reason for sponsor licence suspension.
- You must inform the UK Home Office of any decrease in salaries and job responsibilities. The sponsor management system should be maintained from the joining day of migrant workers.
- To avoid sponsor licence suspension, it is essential that you must conduct internal audits to analyse where you are lacking in fulfilling compliance duties. This practice can help you to stay compliant with your sponsor’s duties.
So these are some of the sponsor duties that sponsor licence holders must fulfil. Suspension of the licence can put you in a complex situation, impacting your business operations and negatively affecting your image in the global business industry. To minimise these complexities, it is essential that you seek professional help from immigration lawyers in the UK. There are some renowned immigration firms in the United Kingdom, such as A Y & J Solicitors. They have a team of immensely knowledgeable and experienced immigration lawyers. Professional help can tremendously benefit sponsor licence holders to save their licence from getting suspended. They can assist you stay updated with all the UK immigration rules and regulations.
In conclusion, we can say that obtaining a sponsor licence can be an easy task, but maintaining it is difficult. Since this licence has various roles and responsibilities, it can be daunting for sponsor licence holders to hold back their licence. However, the only way out is fulfilling all the rules and regulations of the UK visas and immigration. Staying compliant with all your sponsor duties is essential to avoid licence suspension. Establishing a robust human resource system is also crucial for record keeping and managing the daily attendance of migrant workers. This licence is exceptionally important for businesses that are totally dependent on overseas talents.