The Home Office have taken steps to improve the availability of the post-licence priority service, which should make it easier for sponsors to make expedite requests in respect of their licence.
Organisations that hold a sponsor licence, allowing them to sponsor and employ migrant workers, manage their licence using the Sponsorship Management System (SMS). We recently wrote about the upcoming move from the antiquated SMS to the new Sponsor UK system.
For the time being, however, most sponsors must still use the SMS to manage their licence. Requests made on the SMS – for instance, to request an allocation of certificates for sponsoring workers, or to replace Key Personnel on the licence – can take as long as 18 weeks to be resolved.
In certain circumstances, these timescales can present real problems for sponsors. For example, where a sponsor is keen to extend the visa of a skilled migrant worker already working for them in the UK, but they have no certificates available on their licence, the 18-week processing period may mean that the sponsor is unable to obtain a new certificate, and therefore to continue to sponsor the worker, before their existing visa expires.
In an attempt to avoid situations like this, the Home Office introduced a post-licence priority service, allowing sponsors to make an application to expedite their request. Expedited requests, if approved, are dealt with within 5 working days, rather than the usual 18 weeks.
This was a great idea – in theory. Unfortunately, the Home Office opted to only make 60 priority slots available each day. That might sound like a reasonable number, but when you consider that there are now over 100,000 sponsors in the UK, it quickly became apparent that the 60 slots were not sufficient to enable everyone to make use of the expedited service.
Applications for the post-licence priority service had to be submitted via email, at any time between 9am and 5pm each day. However, because of the very limited availability, what would happen in practice is that thousands of solicitors and level 1 users across the country would attempt to submit their priority requests at 9am on the dot, in the hopes of obtaining a slot. The Home Office reported that the full allocation of 60 slots would regularly be filled as early as 9:03am, though, in our experience, applications would often fail even where they were submitted before this time. As a result, it was not uncommon for sponsors or their representatives to fruitlessly submit priority applications every morning, for weeks on end.
In an attempt to combat these issues, the Home Office have now increased the number of available slots to 100 and moved the start time for accepting priority applications to 7am each day. More slots will obviously improve sponsors’ chances of obtaining the expedited service, and the 7am start time may help to stagger applications throughout the morning, reducing the likelihood of the bottlenecks that we were seeing with the 9am start time.
However, 100 slots is still unlikely to meet sponsor demand, and so it remains to be seen whether these changes will ultimately resolve the existing availability issues. We should mention that, since the implementation of these changes in November, we have seen a priority service application receive approval despite being submitted in the early afternoon, which was a vanishingly rare occurrence under the old system. This perhaps indicates that the changes are already achieving their intended aims, even if only for the time being.
If you require assistance with managing your sponsor licence or with sponsoring migrant workers, please get in touch with Callum at [email protected]
