24 January 2013
New UKBA backlog - symptomatic of systemic delays and damaging to the UK economy
The media has widely reported today that the UKBA has a backlog of around 16,000 cases, some of which date back a decade, as uncovered by John Vine, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. For those of us representing clients in this arena, this news is hardly surprising. The UKBA is racked with delays across many of its areas of operation and these are bound to increase as limited resources are spread ever thinner across the agency.
18 January 2013
Applying to naturalise as a British Citizen – are you of good character?
Those applying for naturalisation now need to be aware that any criminal convictions and tax issues can be taken into account when their applications are assessed.
On 13 December 2012, the UK Border Agency (UKBA) announced a change to the way it assesses criminal convictions and this affects how the UKBA will assess the ‘good character’ requirement for naturalisation applications. No longer will criminal convictions be considered ‘spent’ but instead they will be evaluated according to a ‘sentence based threshold’.
8 January 2013
Immigration Alert: Annual Certificates of Sponsorship for 6 April 2013 to 5 April 2014
The UK Border Agency (UKBA) is now sending out emails to Sponsors alerting them to the fact that they can apply for the next annual allocation of Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS) for Tier 2 with effect from 6 January 2013. If your Authorising Officer does receive an email from the UKBA on this subject it will be from a “no-reply” email address and therefore may arrive as spam or junk mail.
20 December 2012
Immigration Alert: Changes to Job Centre Plus Advertising
At present sponsors are required to advertise their vacancies on Job Centre Plus before they can hire a foreign migrant to perform a non-shortage occupation role on a salary of less than £70,000.
19 December 2012
Immigration News Round Up 2012
2012 has been an eventful year for immigration with, amongst other things, 2 UK Border Agency (UKBA) consultations which related directly, or indirectly, to the work routes, as well as changes to the rules relating to family migration. In particular, there has been a complete overhaul of the Tier 2 job codes with an increase in skill level from NQF 4+ to NQF 6+, a proposed introduction of minimum salary levels for entry level occupations, the introduction of a 12 month cooling off period for points-based system migrants and changes to the rules on settling in the UK.