The licence is the easy part
Getting granted takes eight weeks. Staying A-rated is permanent, and every obligation below has a deadline that starts when the event happens — not when someone in HR finds out about it.
Where compliance failures take you
You cannot sponsor anyone from overseas.
Full sponsor. You can assign certificates and hire.
Downgraded. No new certificates until an action plan is completed.
Sponsorship stops while UKVI investigates.
Licence withdrawn. Sponsored staff lose permission to work.
Everything you owe UKVI, and when
Three kinds of obligation: things you have to report inside a deadline, records you have to be able to produce on the day you are asked, and standing requirements that apply continuously. Working days exclude weekends and bank holidays.
Reporting
A sponsored worker does not start
They fail to turn up on their first day, or never arrive in the UK at all.
A sponsored worker stops working for you
Resignation, dismissal, redundancy, or the contract ending. Report the date and the reason.
Unauthorised absence of 10 or more days
Ten consecutive working days missed with no permission and no explanation you accept.
A significant change to the job
Salary, duties, hours, occupation code or work location changing enough to matter.
A change to your business
Address, ownership, structure, a merger or takeover, insolvency, or a change of key personnel.
Records
Right to work checks
A compliant check before employment starts, and repeated where permission is time-limited. This applies to your whole workforce, not just sponsored staff.
Documents for each sponsored worker
Passport or identity document, visa or share code record, contract, qualifications and accreditations relied on.
Contact details, kept current
Address, telephone number and where the person actually works — including every site they work from.
Attendance and absence
Something that would let you answer, on the day UKVI asks, whether a given worker was at work last Tuesday.
Compliance
Sponsor only genuine, suitable roles
The job has to remain real and remain at the level and salary you certified.
Pay the sponsorship costs yourself
The licence fee, the certificate fee and the Immigration Skills Charge cannot be recovered from the worker. Doing so puts the licence at risk on its own.
Cooperate with UKVI
Compliance visits can be announced or unannounced, before the licence is granted and at any point afterwards.
Compliant sponsors do not decide to breach
Almost no licence is lost through a deliberate act. It is lost because an ordinary business event happened and the reporting did not follow it. Every one of these is a real sequence, and every one of them is preventable with a named owner and a calendar.
The person who set the licence up leaves, and nobody is nominated to replace them as Level 1 User.
A worker resigns, HR processes the leaver, and nobody files the report on the sponsorship management system.
The business moves office and updates Companies House, but not UKVI.
A pay review pushes a sponsored role's salary or duties far enough from the certificate to be reportable, and nobody notices.
Right to work checks are done properly for sponsored staff and casually for everyone else — which is where civil penalties come from.
Records are held in a system the person who left set up, and nobody else can produce them on the day.
What happens when UKVI finds something
A licence is lost in stages. Knowing which stage you are at determines whether this is a fixable problem or an operational emergency — and the response to a suspension is measured in days, not weeks.
Downgrade to B-rating
UKVI finds your systems fall short but believes they can be fixed.
You cannot assign new certificates until you complete a chargeable action plan. Existing sponsored staff keep working. Fail the plan and the licence goes.
Suspension
UKVI suspects a serious breach and needs to investigate.
Sponsorship stops while the investigation runs. You cannot assign certificates. Your name stays off the published register during this period.
Revocation
A serious breach is made out, or a B-rated sponsor fails its action plan.
The licence is withdrawn. Certificates already assigned are cancelled, and sponsored employees normally have 60 days to find another sponsor or leave the UK. There is no appeal.
Cooling-off period
A licence is revoked, or an application is refused for a suitability reason.
You are usually barred from applying again for a set period, commonly 12 months, and sometimes longer. Your hiring plan stops for that whole period.
Civil penalty
Illegal working is found, whether or not it involves a sponsored worker.
A penalty per worker, on top of anything that happens to the licence. An unpaid penalty is itself a reason to refuse a future licence application.
If UKVI has written to you about a suspension or served a compliance report, the response window is short and the response itself is the whole game. Phone us rather than filling in the form.
When were you last audited the way UKVI would audit you?
A mock audit run to the current framework tells you what a visit would actually turn up — while there is still time to fix it.