UK work visa: The Home Office recently announced that they would shortly do away with the requirement to renew sponsor licences every four years, which is a huge relief to both employers and foreign nationals living in the UK. For firms in the nation, which previously had to deal with an enormous amount of paperwork and expensive fees to retain employees, this will make things a lot easier.

As to the information provided by UK Visas and Immigration on gov.uk, in order to hire an individual from outside the UK, a UK sponsor licence is mandatory. This includes individuals who are residents of EU member states, as well as citizens of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland who arrived in the UK after December 31, 2020. Education providers also required a sponsor licence in order to bring faculty and students from abroad to the UK.

• As of April 6, there will be no more regulations requiring sponsor licences to be renewed every four years.
• Sponsor licences that are about to expire will be automatically extended by ten years once they begin, meaning there won’t be any need for renewals at all.
• Sponsors with active licences throughout this period need not do anything; the extension will take care of their licences automatically.

• Companies that sponsored licences were required to submit applications 90 days prior to the licences’ expiration.
• In addition, a substantial fee ranging from £536 to £1,476 was demanded of them, depending on their size and charitable status.
• Renewal processing periods may also take up to eight weeks.

In the renewal procedure, the UK Home Office will reimburse application fees to sponsors; however, sponsors are urged to use the online Sponsorship Management System (SMS) to confirm the expiration date of their licence. It stated that contacts have been made with sponsors who have already started the renewal process.

In the UK, immigration has always been a sensitive topic. The government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak intends to raise the expense of recruiting foreign workers, with a significant increase in pay requirements announced in December.