UK Immigration News

While April’s Tier 2 visa changes continue to cause problems for most British businesses with tier 2 sponsorship licences, UK architect firms won’t be affected by the UK visa rules for recruiting highly-skilled, non-EU workers on tier 2 visas.

The Home Office has admitted that it does not know how many foreign teachers in the UK will have to leave at the end of five years in the UK because of new Tier 2 visa rules.

A leading think tank says that net annual UK visa  numbers need to be at 200,000 to avoid the collapse of the British economy, post-Brexit. Presumably many of these people will be employed by employers with Tier 2 Sponsorship Licences on Tier 2 visas.

London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has slammed the Conservative’s over the party’s ‘anti-London’ visa policy. Khan says that the policies laid out by the Tories in their recently released manifesto ‘will make all Londoners poorer’, while stifling jobs and business growth.   There is only about a week to go before the UK General Election on 8 June 2017.

A report published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) says that the Tier 2 visa system is barely used by Britain’s small businesses. Recently released research revealed that 95 per cent of UK small firms had never used the Tier 2, points-based immigration system and few were in possession of a Tier 2 Sponsorship Licence.

Chinese state-owned telecoms giant, ZTE is a recent victim of the UK government’s Tier 2 visa sponsor licence inspections. The Home Office has suspended ZTE from the Tier 2 Sponsorship Licence scheme, used by overseas organisations to recruit foreign nationals to work in the UK, stating that ZTE ‘had not fulfilled its duties.’