Sponsor licences for professional services
Accountancy, legal, consultancy and recruitment firms. Client-facing placements and partner structures both need explaining carefully in the application.
What UKVI looks hardest at here
The duties are identical in every sector. What a visiting officer pulls out of your files is not — and in professional services these are the things that get examined first.
Whether the sponsored worker is employed by the applying entity
Partnership and LLP structures, and who the Authorising Officer can be
Client site working, and whether it amounts to supplying labour
Where professional employers get caught
Recruitment agencies applying to sponsor workers they intend to place elsewhere.
An Authorising Officer nominated who is not actually senior enough to hold the role.
Consultants at client sites with no attendance record held by the sponsor.
None of these are unusual. They are the ordinary operating conditions of the sector colliding with reporting deadlines nobody owns.
The deadlines that apply to you
These are the same for every sponsor. Read them against the traps above — most of those are a missed 10-working-day report wearing a sector-specific disguise.
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.
Hiring into professional services?
Tell us the roles and where the business is up to. We will come back with whether you would be granted, what it costs, and the sector-specific things a visiting officer would ask you about.