Sponsor Licence Revocations

As the UK Immigration Rules do not give you any right to appeal a revoked sponsor licence, if you have been unsuccessful taking the Judicial Review route or you have decided with your immigration lawyer to not challenge the Home Office’s decision, you will likely have no option but to wait for the “cooling-off period” to conclude.

Once that “cooling-off period” has elapsed, your organisation will be entitled to apply again to the Home Office for a sponsor licence – and if you do decide to take this route, the Home Office will treat your application the same as any other sponsor licence application.

With our immigration specialists’ extensive knowhow and experience in handling sponsor licence applications, we can help maximise your likelihood of being successful with your sponsor licence application after the “cooling-off period” has come to an end. Our work can include helping you resolve any of the breaches or compliance issues that led to your sponsor licence being revoked in the first place.

Please call 0208 215 0053 for further information about how our immigration solicitors in central London could help you.

In the event that you do decide you would like to challenge the Home Office’s decision to revoke your organisation’s sponsorship licence, it will be of imperative importance to gather evidence that supports the response you wish to make. This will maximise the chances of you achieving the outcome that you desire, which may even include your sponsor licence merely being temporarily downgraded, instead of being revoked altogether.

It will greatly help, of course, if you know what that response will actually be. So, before you start bringing together evidence, you will need to discuss the situation with your relevant team members and legal advisors – the latter potentially including our own award-winning experts in immigration law here at Cranbrook Legal.

From there, you will be able to agree on a strategy that your team is comfortable with – at which point, it will be time to start obtaining relevant and accurate evidence to support your response to the Home Office.

This gathering together of evidence might be a trickier task for some organisations than it is for others – indeed, poor and/or inconsistent record-keeping may have been a factor in your business having its sponsor licence revoked in the first place.

For some firms, some important documents – such as those in relation to payroll – might be owned and maintained across various functions and premises, so the process of sourcing relevant evidence will need to be well-coordinated.

As a broad rule, your organisation having its sponsor licence revoked will mean it also immediately loses the right to employ its current sponsored workers. This could mean, depending on your business and the national origins of your employees, you are effectively no longer permitted to employ most or all of your current non-UK national workers.

It is important to note that while an organisation in the UK will typically need a sponsor licence in order to hire someone from outside the UK to work for them, this is not the case for all groups of foreign nationals who might be working for your company.

The groups of people that firms in the UK can employ without the need for a sponsor licence include:

• Irish citizens
• People with settled or pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme
• People with indefinite leave to remain in the UK

So, even in the event that your organisation is subject to a revoked sponsor licence, you will be entitled to continue employing any members of your workforce in the above categories.

If, though, there are other foreign nationals among your company’s present employees – including citizens of the European Union (EU), Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland who arrived in the UK after 31 December 2020 –it is likely that you will have needed a sponsor licence in order to employ such people. These are the workers that you will cease to have the right to employ as a result of a sponsor licence revocation.

However, the exact immediate effect that the revocation of your firm’s sponsor licence has on your sponsored workers on the Worker and Temporary Worker routes, will depend on the below:

• If the Home Office believes that the given sponsored worker was actively and knowingly involved in the reasons for your organisation’s sponsor licence being revoked – in other words, if they were complicit in this –it will immediately cancel all of the worker’s remaining permission. This will mean that the worker has no permission remaining, andwill be required to leave the UK immediately or face enforced removal.An example of a sponsored worker being complicit in this way, would be if they had agreed that you would arrange a non-existent job for them as a way to enable them to come to the UK.
• Alternatively, the Home Office may judge that your sponsored worker was not actively or knowingly involved in the reasons for the sponsor licence revocation. In situations like this of the worker not being judged to be complicit, the Home Office will usually shorten the employee’s remaining permission to 60 calendar days. If the given worker only has a maximum of 60 calendar days’ permission remaining at the time the Home Office considers cancellation action, the worker’s permission will not normally be shortened any further than this. If this situation applies to your own sponsored worker, the 60 days or less of remaining permission could give them the time and opportunity to apply for permission to stay in the UK, on a route for which they qualify. Otherwise, once their remaining permission expires, the worker will need to leave the UK or face enforced removal.

With a Judicial Review being such a specialised and complicated legal process, it is vital that you receive the very best legal advice prior to taking this route, so that you can be sure of having a strong chance of success in this endeavour.

Our central London-based law firm operates on a fixed-fee basis for the majority of our immigration services. This will give you crucial predictability with regard to the costs, so that you can budget accordingly. There will be no additional costs or hidden charges for you to worry about.

To find out more about the likely costs of challenging a sponsor licence revocation with our award-winning assistance and expertise in immigration law, please consult our fees page. It is also important to remember that we offer the opportunity of a free consultation to those enquiring about our services; please call 0208 215 0053 or contact us online for further information.

To help ensure organisations’adherence with their sponsor licence responsibilities, the Home Office often arranges compliance visits to licence-holding firms’ premises.

You may receive prior notice of such a visit, or a Home Office official might visit your organisation unannounced. It may be likelier that a given visit is unannounced if it wasprompted by intelligence such as HMRC reporting possible irregularities, or even simply because there have been concerns in the past about your organisation’s sponsor licence compliance.

When a Home Office official visits your organisation’s premises for a sponsor licence compliance visit, whether announced or unannounced, a key component of the visit is likely to be an interview of relevant staff. If the visit is announced in advance, the Home Office may tell you which members of your personnel it wishes to interview for this purpose.

However, you cannot assume that the visiting Home Office official will onlyinterview your named sponsored staff. So, you are advised to suitably prepare your key personnel and sponsored staff, presuming that any of them could be interviewed.

If a Home Office official does visit your organisation’s premises and carry out such an interview, you are entitled to ask that a copy is provided of the handwritten interview notes they make. These notes should be provided to you at the end of the visit.