31 January 2013
Immigration Alert: Changes to Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) Route
On 30 January 2013, the UK Border Agency (UKBA) made a number of changes to the Immigration Rules for the Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) category to introduce a ‘genuine entrepreneur’ test. The changes will take effect on 31 January 2013 and will affect all applications decided after this date, even if they were submitted prior to 31 January 2013.
28 January 2013
Immigration Alert: Changes in the assessment of good character in citizenship applications
From 13 December 2012, changes were made to the Nationality Instructions that affect anyone applying for citizenship on or after that date. The main changes deal with criminality and how it is assessed in terms of the good character requirement in citizenship applications.
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.