We were recently instructed to provide urgent legal advice and assistance to two sponsors offering higher education courses following UKVI’s decision, in both cases, to suspend them from the Tier 4 and Tier 2 register of sponsors.
In one of the cases, UKVI had raised a number of concerns including an allegation that our client had failed to correctly notify UKVI of all its sites and partnerships and had not conducted thorough assessments of the intention and ability of a number of students to whom it had issued CAS. In the other case, UKVI’s primary concern was that one of the sponsor’s courses did not meet the requirements of Tier 4.
In both cases we advised the sponsors to firstly make a number of changes to their processes and procedures to ensure that any issues highlighted by UKVI were addressed. We also advised one of the sponsors to withdraw the course that UKVI was concerned about and for the other sponsor we investigated its partnership arrangement which had been in existence prior to the Points Based System coming into force. Our representations included detailed explanations concerning each allegation raised by UKVI along with information concerning the measures taken to address the issues raised to ensure that similar problems could not arise again in the future and an outline of the relevant law.
UKVI reviewed our submissions and reinstated both licences.
The recently published Legal 500 refers to us as being ‘outstanding in knitting together law, policy and strategy’ and this is an example of our bespoke and pragmatic approach to the difficulties many sponsors face. If you require advice concerning a sponsor licence, please contact us.
