The four duties, in plain terms
Everything the Home Office asks of a sponsor comes back to these.
- Record keeping Right to work checks in the prescribed form, contact details, absence records, copies of documents, and evidence of recruitment where required — all retained as the sponsor guidance specifies.
- Reporting Changes reported through the sponsor management system within the deadlines, which are short. A worker who does not turn up, leaves, changes role or changes work location all trigger reporting duties.
- Monitoring Attendance and immigration status. Knowing when a worker's leave expires is your responsibility, not only theirs.
- General compliance Operating lawfully, not acting in a way that undermines immigration control, and cooperating with the Home Office — including during a visit.
Compliance visits: what actually happens
A visit can be before a licence is granted, at any point afterwards, announced or unannounced. Officers attend your premises, confirm the organisation is genuinely operating there, and test whether the systems described actually exist.
In practice they will ask to see records for named sponsored workers, look at how right to work checks are carried out and stored, ask the key personnel to explain the reporting process, and speak to sponsored staff about their role, duties and hours. That last part matters — a worker who describes a job different from the one on the Certificate of Sponsorship is a serious problem, and it is often the first sign of an occupation code that never fitted.
What fails a visit is not usually dishonesty. It is an Authorising Officer who cannot describe the systems, records held somewhere nobody can find, or a sponsor management system nobody has logged into since the last person left.
We run mock audits that replicate this. It is uncomfortable and that is the point — far better to hear it from us.
Downgrade, suspension and revocation
There are three sanctions and they escalate.
Downgrade to B-rating. You cannot assign Certificates of Sponsorship for new workers, you must follow a Home Office action plan, and you pay for it. Existing workers usually stay. Complete the plan and the A-rating is restored; fail and the licence goes.
Suspension. Sponsorship activity stops while the Home Office investigates. You are told what is alleged and given a period — usually short — to respond in writing. That response is the whole case: it is where evidence is put forward and remedial action demonstrated. Getting it right matters enormously and the deadline is unforgiving.
Revocation. The licence ends. Existing sponsored workers have their leave curtailed, normally to 60 days or the balance of their leave if shorter, in which time they must find a new sponsor, switch to another route or leave the UK.
The human cost of that last one is the part employers underestimate. Revocation does not only end your ability to recruit — it puts every sponsored employee and their family at immediate risk of having to leave the country.
Illegal working penalties
Separate from sponsorship, and much larger than most employers realise.
The civil penalty for employing someone without the right to work rose on 13 February 2024 to up to £45,000 per worker for a first breach and up to £60,000 per worker for a repeat breach. Those figures replaced £15,000 and £20,000, so an organisation working from a pre-2024 understanding is out by a factor of three.
The defence is a statutory excuse: a right to work check carried out correctly, in the prescribed manner, before employment began, and retained properly. Done right it protects you even if the worker turns out not to have had the right to work. Done late, incompletely or retrospectively, it protects you not at all.
This is why right to work checks are worth doing properly for every employee, not only sponsored ones — and it is one of the first things a compliance visit will test.
If your licence is already in trouble
Call us today rather than next week. The deadlines in suspension and revocation are short and they are not routinely extended.
What we do depends on where you are. On a downgrade, we work through the action plan and get the systems into the state required. On a suspension, we prepare the written response — gathering evidence, addressing each allegation directly, and setting out remedial action already taken rather than promised. On a revocation, we advise on whether any challenge is realistic, and just as importantly on what happens to your sponsored workers and what their options are.
We will give you an honest view of prospects. Some suspensions are recoverable and some are not, and you are better served by knowing which you are facing than by paying for optimism.