What a compliance inspector sees

For over a decade, Hollie Rae was on the other side of the table. She carried out sponsor licence compliance visits for the Home Office, deciding whether care providers kept the right to sponsor skilled workers.

She's now Lifted's Compliance Lead, and we sat down with her to ask what she genuinely saw, over and over, out in the field.

Most sponsor licence issues come down to not knowing the guidance, not fraud

Every sponsor signs a declaration, confirming they understand their duties. According to Hollie, a lot of them don't, and it's rarely because they're trying to pull a fast one. It's because the guidance runs to hundreds of pages across several documents, and nobody's walked them through the parts that actually matter.

Appendix D is a good example. It sets out exactly which records a sponsor needs to keep, and Hollie says most providers she's spoken to since joining Lifted have never even heard of it.

The right to work checks you used to be able to talk your way around have changed

Right-to-work checks used to be done on paper, and paper has always had a bit of give in it. Now, they're digital, and the system logs the exact date a check was carried out.

If your contract shows a start date before the check date, you can't quietly fix that after the fact anymore. It's just there.

Three areas cause almost all sponsor licence compliance problems

A compliance visit looks at several things, but Hollie's clear that most of the real risk sits in three places:

• Right to work: whether checks were done properly and on time, with evidence to back it up
• Genuine vacancy: whether the person is actually doing the job they were sponsored for
• Pay: whether they're earning what their visa states, and if not, whether that's been reported

Underpayment is usually a reporting gap, not a genuine breach

A worker on statutory sick pay or maternity leave will often earn less than their visa says. That's not automatically a breach. It only becomes one if it hasn't been reported.

Hollie's point is that most providers don't fail because they set out to underpay someone; they fail because they didn't know reporting a change like that was part of the job.

What this means for your sponsor licence risk

You don't need to memorise the guidance cover to cover. You need to know where the risk actually sits - right to work, genuine vacancy, and pay - and get into the habit of reporting changes rather than hoping nobody notices.

There are roughly 120,000 sponsors on the register, and we're seeing a sharp rise in sponsors that we work with having enquiries or inspections from the Home Office.

Not being checked isn't the same as being compliant. It just means you haven't found out yet.