The Home Office compliance visits aim at checking whether an organisation has the appropriate HR and recruitment systems and procedures in place to be able to monitor the migrant workers and ensure that the organisation’s duties and obligations as a Licensed sponsor have been fulfilled.

Such visits can be conducted by the UK Visas and Immigration before or after the Sponsorship License has been granted and can be announced or unannounced.

The visits were suspended during the first lockdown and then again in December 2020 when the United Kingdom entered second national lockdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak. As the UK Government has started to ease the restrictions, the Home Office has now announced that the compliance visits will shortly be resumed.

The prospective and existing Licensed sponsors are aware that it is important to comply with the Home Office’s requirements since noncompliance may lead to the License application being refused or existing License being suspended or revoked. This, essentially, could lead to inability to offer sponsorship to migrant workers.

With reference to the most recent statistics published by the Home Office, 523 Sponsorship Licenses were suspended between Q4 2019 and Q3 2020. This figure was considerably lower in comparison with the previous 12 months’ period, largely due to the pandemic. The Compliance Officers are becoming more rigorous, as such, we remind all Licensed sponsors about the importance of complying with their duties and obligations and being up to date with the recent changes in the compliance procedure.

At Chan Neill Solicitors we regularly assist organisations with their Sponsorship License matters. We conduct mock Compliance Visits and assist the organisations during the Home Office visits. For more information please do not hesitate to contact our office.