To make the most of your techUK website experience, please login or register for your free account here.
Yvette Cooper, the new Home Secretary has indicated that the Labour Government will retain most of the previous government’s measures to reduce migration, including April’s increase in the minimum salary employers pay to sponsor staff on Skilled Worker visas.
This makes the Scale-up visa a particularly useful alternative route for eligible firms as they can sponsor qualifying talent on lower salaries in a more cost-effective immigration option for international talent.
To accompany our panel discussion Unlocking Talent in Tech Scale-Ups at techUK on 15 October 2024, Ben Maitland, Senior Associate at Vanessa Ganguin Immigration Law has written this guide to help techUK members work out if they may benefit from this useful option for overseas hires.
A Scale-up sponsor licence allows high-growth UK businesses to recruit qualifying highly-skilled migrants. This relatively new immigration option was recently expanded to allow start-ups under four years-old with scale-up potential to qualify too if endorsed by one of the government-appointed organisations. It offers more flexibility than other sponsorship options, plus applying for a licence can be a relatively streamlined, swift process.
There are also potential savings for employers, as there is no skills charge to pay for sponsored employees. The skills charge is an annual fee which ranges between £364 and £1,000 for each sponsored worker, depending on the size of a business. While on the Skilled Worker visa – the main option for sponsoring skilled staff from abroad – hires must be paid an above-average wage for their occupation, on a Scale-up visa the salary need only match or exceed the bottom 25th percentile of the going rate for the job. So, for example programmers and software development professionals sponsored as Skilled Workers must be paid a minimum of £49,400 (based on a 37.5-hour working week) and £25.33 per hour, while on a Scale-up visa, the minimum is £36,300 (£18.62 per hour).
Employers may choose to operate a Scale-up sponsor licence at the same time as a Skilled Worker sponsor licence and other work immigration options for other staff. Other options for tech firms recruiting migrant workers include the Graduate visa, Global Talent visa, Innovator Founder visa, High Potential visa, Youth Mobility Scheme and Global Business Mobility options.
To qualify under the standard pathway, a business must demonstrate annualised growth of at least 20% for the three-year period prior to the application based on either staff count or turnover. The organisation must have had a minimum of 10 employees at the start of the three years. UK Visas & Immigration (UKVI) will assess this from a company’s UK tax record for the period.
If a company doesn’t have a long enough history with the HMRC it may now apply to one of the UK Government approved endorsing bodies to endorse its qualification as a scale-up before applying for the sponsor licence (within three months of endorsement).
These are the bodies that can issue Scale-up endorsements for companies which cannot use the HMRC route (as well as the necessary endorsements for Innovator Founder visa applications):
To qualify for an endorsement, firms must satisfy one of the above bodies that they meet all the following requirements:
As well as meeting all the above requirements, Scale-ups seeking endorsement must demonstrate three out of the following five requirements:
Hires on a Scale-up visa must be filling a genuine vacancy for someone at a minimum skill level of RQF Level 6. This is higher than the RQF Level 3 skill level minimum for the most popular work visa route, the Skilled Worker visa. A list of qualifying occupations can be found on the UK Home Office’s Appendix Skilled Occupations list. There are English language and financial requirements that candidates must also meet.
People in the UK on another immigration route can change to the Scale-up route if they meet all relevant requirements unless they are in the UK with their last permission granted as a visitor, short-term student, parent of a child student, seasonal worker, domestic worker in a private household or outside the UK’s Immigration Rules. If a worker is in the UK on any of the aforementioned routes, they will need to leave the UK and apply for a Scale-up visa from abroad.
Scale-up sponsor licences are valid for 4 years and cannot be renewed or reapplied for. After that period employers would use other sponsor licence options for sponsoring new overseas workers.
Unlike other sponsored immigration routes, the Scale-up visa has sponsored and unsponsored stages. Scale-ups need only sponsor Scale-up workers for the first six months of their first two-year visa. After six months of employment, they can work carry on working for their employer without the bureaucracy of sponsorship, work elsewhere or work for themselves if they so choose, or even a mix of all three. So long as their earnings over the first two years met the required threshold, Scale-up workers can keep renewing their visa for another three years without needing to be sponsored.
After five years continuous qualifying residence, Scale-up Workers can apply for indefinite leave to remain in the UK if they meet earning and residence requirements such as passing the Life in the UK test. Qualifying dependent partners and dependent children may apply to accompany or join migrants on a Scale-up visa, and after five qualifying years may also apply for settlement.
You can find more about how sponsor licences work here. More information on other UK work visa options can be found here.
For more details on the Scale-up visa or other immigration questions please call Ben on 0207 033 9527 or email [email protected]
Ben Maitland, Senior Associate, Vanessa Ganguin Immigration Law
Ben Maitland has extensive experience advising individuals on UK immigration as well as entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes. He regularly works with tech firms and figures on routes such as Global Talent visas and Global Business Mobility options. Ben also writes articles and presents on immigration matters. He is on the LexisNexis Editorial Board for Immigration, reflecting his command of this ever-changing area of UK law. Based in the heart of Shoreditch, techUK members Vanessa Ganguin Immigration Law advise the tech, fintech, engineering, science and creative sectors among others on every aspect of the UK’s ever-changing immigration rules.
Website: https://vanessaganguin.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-maitland-/
Email: [email protected]
techUK help our SME members to do things they may struggle to do alone. We help them to affect policy that is beneficial to their businesses. We showcase their products and services to our audiences. We facilitate meetings and events, and we create opportunities for them to meet clients, customers, policy makers and politicians. Visit the programme page here.
