The UK Government have made proposals to refund future sponsors under the UK Scale Up visa route, as well as promising to expedite future Scale Up sponsor licence applications.
What is the Scale Up visa route?
The Scale Up visa route is a sponsored (and unsponsored in some cases) visa route for organisations that can demonstrate a 20% annualised increase in turnover or headcount over 3 years, and at least 10 employees on the day of application. Essentially, it is a exclusive visa route for high growth companies with an established UK operation to sponsor overseas workers.
Scale Up visas are issued for up to 2-years, and lead to indefinite leave to remain after 5 years.
How are the government planning to support Scale Up sponsors?
At present, it costs £55 to sponsor a Scale Up worker for up to 2 years at a time. The Scale Up applicant then has to pay a £937 visa processing fee and an Immigration Health Surcharge fee of £2,070, making the total cost of a 2-year visa £3,062.
The Chancellor’s proposals would therefore cover the cost of the main applicant and most of the costs of a single dependent too.
How many companies will this affect?
Last year there were only around 1,000 Scale Up visas granted, compared to around 48,000 Skilled Worker visas granted over the same period. Only 93 companies currently hold Scale Up sponsor licences, so why aren’t more companies applying for Scale Up visas?
It could be the barrier to entry: the 20% annualised increase over 3 years is a rarer achievement that you might think. Essentially, a company’s final turnover after the 3-year period would need to be 72.8% higher than the starting turnover, which does make it difficult for companies that have already been established whose revenue increases, while sizeable, might have smaller increases in terms of percentage.
In fact, in 2023, under 40,000 UK businesses could meet this requirement, which is just 1.4% of all UK businesses.
What effect might these proposals have?
The proposals are more likely to encourage more UK companies to look back over the last 3 years and see if they could qualify for the Scale Up licence, since it essentially enables them to sponsor up to 5 workers for no cost.
For the sectors that the UK is looking to boost, the government might also want to consider doing the same for specific job roles in the Skilled Worker visa route by exempting more SOC codes from the Immigration Skills Charge for example.
Could your business qualify for a Scale Up sponsor licence?
Get in touch with us for a free assessment on whether your company could qualify to apply for a Scale Up sponsor licence to make the most of these future proposals.