If your company is approaching its one year anniversary as a sponsor licence holder, your Authorising Officer should shortly receive an email from the UKBA advising you to renew your allocation of Certificates of Sponsorship. It is important to note that any unused certificate allocation will not be carried over to the next year and will be automatically removed from the Sponsor Management System (SMS). Therefore, please ensure that you lodge your request for a “follow-on” allocation of Tier 2 (General) and Tier 2 (ICT) certificates (and Tier 5, if applicable) soon after you receive your first notification from the UKBA and certainly before you reach your one year anniversary as a sponsor licence holder. If you are unsure of when your licence was granted you can check by going onto the Sponsor Management System and clicking on “view and edit sponsor profile” and then “sponsor summary”. The UKBA recommends that you allow them four weeks to process your request.
Note that your sponsor licence is valid for four years, and so requesting your next allocation of certificates will not incur a fee. If you have appointed Wright Hassall as your representative on the SMS and you would like us to check the date your licence was granted and file the request for certificates for you, we would be happy to do so – just let us know the number of certificates you require over the next 12 months and the associated business reason. The Authorising Officer will be notified by letter once the request has been granted.
For more information on Certificates of Sponsorship please contact
Marian Dixon or
Peter Dixon in the business immigration team.
This article was first published in Business Immigration eBulletin October 2009
