Immigration support for businesses, investors and entrepreneurs setting up or expanding in the UK.
If you are growing a business in the UK and the people you need are not in the UK, immigration stops being a personal matter and becomes an operational one. It sits with you, not with them. The licence is in your organisation's name, the reporting duties are yours, and the penalties land on you. Most employers arrive with a version of the same three questions. What will this cost us. How long will it take. What is our exposure if we get it wrong. Those are the right questions, and they deserve a straight answer rather than an hourly rate and a shrug. Our fee is £500 per application, fixed, whatever the application is. The first conversation costs nothing, including the one where we tell you that you do not need us.
This is a general guide only; we confirm your exact position at the free consultation.
A free consultation to identify the right business route
A document and evidence checklist tailored to your route
Preparation of your application, with an internal review
Your approval before we submit
Updates through to the decision
Most businesses need the same three things in the same order: the right route, a licence, and then a process that does not fall apart six months later.
We start by working out what you are actually trying to do, because the route follows the commercial objective and not the other way round. Hiring one specialist is a different problem from opening a UK office, and both are different again from moving existing staff across from an overseas parent company.
Then we prepare the licence application, and we get the underlying HR systems into shape while we do it, because those systems are part of what is being assessed. After that we support the assignment of Certificates of Sponsorship and the worker applications that follow, so the two halves match.
We also work with employers who already hold a licence and want it stress-tested before somebody else tests it for them. If your records have never been reviewed, or the person who set the whole thing up has left, a compliance visit is not the moment to discover what is missing.
None of these are exotic. They are ordinary administrative failures, and they are what enforcement action is usually built on.
Revocation is the outcome to plan against, because it does more than stop future hiring — it curtails the permission of every worker you currently sponsor. Our sponsor licence page sets out the duties in full.
Our fee is £500 per application, and the wording matters. A sponsor licence application is £500. Each worker application is £500. If you are bringing in four people, you are buying five applications, not one, and you should be able to see that on a spreadsheet before you commit rather than discover it on an invoice.
It is fixed in both directions. The fee does not rise because your group structure is complicated, because the Home Office comes back with questions, or because the matter runs longer than anyone expected. Hourly billing puts that uncertainty on your budget. We would rather carry it on ours.
The government charges are separate: the licence fee, a fee for each Certificate of Sponsorship you assign, the Immigration Skills Charge, and the application fee and health surcharge the worker pays. The Immigration Skills Charge cannot lawfully be passed on to the worker — not by agreement, not by deduction, not through a repayment clause. Some costs can be shared between employer and worker; that one is a compliance line rather than a negotiation.
All of these figures are set by government and are revised, so we do not publish numbers here that could be out of date by the time you read them. You get a written breakdown built around your actual hiring plan, covering the whole lifecycle rather than the first step. You can model it yourself with our cost calculator, or bring your numbers to a free consultation and we will work through them with you.
If your organisation does not yet have a UK presence, the order of operations decides your timeline. A licence is granted to an entity that exists and can evidence lawful UK trading, so incorporation, a business bank account, premises and any regulatory registrations generally have to come first. Plenty of businesses plan the visa timeline without the corporate timeline underneath it, and lose a quarter to it.
Where a senior person needs to come over to establish or run the UK operation, there are routes designed for exactly that, and they carry their own evidence requirements about the overseas business and the role being filled here. Which one fits depends on your structure, your ownership and what that person will genuinely be doing.
We will map a realistic sequence against the start date you have in mind, and tell you honestly if that date is not achievable. A timeline you can plan around is worth considerably more than an optimistic one. The worker-side requirements your candidates will face are set out on our Skilled Worker visa page.
For most employers hiring from overseas it is sponsorship under the Skilled Worker route, which means obtaining a licence first. Expansion routes, senior transfers and founder-led routes exist and work differently. The right answer depends on the roles, the salaries, your ownership structure and your timescales.
In this order: obtain a sponsor licence, assign a Certificate of Sponsorship for a genuine role that meets the skill and salary requirements, and then the worker makes their own application. Each stage has its own timeline, and they overlap less than people hope.
Yes, though the sequencing matters. The entity generally needs to exist and be able to evidence lawful UK trading before a licence will be granted, so the corporate work comes before the immigration work rather than alongside it.
Reporting relevant changes within the Home Office deadlines, keeping the specified records for every sponsored worker, carrying out right-to-work checks correctly, only sponsoring roles that genuinely exist, and cooperating with audits. One named person in your organisation should own all of it.
Some costs can be shared by agreement. The Immigration Skills Charge cannot. It cannot lawfully be recovered from the worker by deduction, by clawback or by consent. Getting this wrong is a compliance breach, not just a contractual dispute.
It depends on the licence timeline, the Certificate assignment and the worker's own application, and on whether priority services are available and worth using. We map a realistic sequence against the start date you want, and tell you plainly if it does not work.
Yes. We check your records, your reporting history and your right-to-work files against what a compliance officer would ask to see, and tell you what needs fixing. It is a far cheaper exercise than responding to a suspension.
Then we say so. Sometimes the candidate already has the right to work. Sometimes the role can be filled without sponsorship. Sometimes the timeline simply does not work and you need a different plan. We would rather tell you that at a free consultation than take a fee for an application that was never the right move.
Book your free 30-minute consultation for a straightforward, honest assessment of your matter.