Guidance

Pre-licence priority service guidance (accessible)

Updated 10 March 2023

About the service

The pre-licence priority service allows organisations to prioritise their application for a sponsor licence, by paying an additional fee when they submit their online application.

This service ensures your application will be considered withing ten working days, it does not guarantee your application will be approved.

Eligibility

Please note, applications for the routes below are not eligible for priority service at this moment in time:

• GBM UK Expansion Worker
• GBM Service Supplier
• GBM Secondment Worker
• Scale-up Worker
• Government Authorised Exchange
• International Agreement
• Seasonal Worker

If your application includes one or more of these routes you will not be offered the option to request priority service.

To be eligible for this service:

• you must have applied for a sponsor licence in an eligible route(s) by registering and completing the online application form on the Home Office Website

• you must have paid the application fee and the priority service fee

• you must have sent us your submission sheet and all mandatory and supplementary documents for the work routes you are applying for as explained in Appendix A to SponsorshipValidations@homeoffice.gov.uk

  • within 5 working days of paying the priority service fee if you are submitting your application or
  • if you are adding the priority service to an already submitted application, you must already have submitted these documents
  • if you want to add the priority service to an already submitted application your application must not be in progress

How to apply

Full guidance on how to apply for a sponsor licence can be found within the Workers and Temporary Workers - guidance for sponsors part 1: apply for a licence.

The priority service is available for eligible applications submitted between 9.00am and 23.59pm Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays.

A maximum of 30 priority service requests are available each day across all eligible routes.

You can request priority service when you make your application for a sponsor licence and pay the priority service fee with your application fee, subject to the eligibility criteria above. You will receive confirmation of your payment on your submission sheet.

You can also request priority service after you have submitted your application and paid your application fee, subject to the eligibility criteria above. To do this, you will need to log back into your sponsor application account using your username and password and select ‘Finish incomplete applications’.

It is therefore vital that make a note of your user ID and password because if you forget it, you will not be able to log back in to make your request for priority service.

If you request priority service and pay the fee after you have paid your application fee, you will receive confirmation of your payment on a separate submission sheet. You do not need to e-mail this submission sheet to us.

There are several reasons why you may not be presented with the option to request priority service:

• you are applying for an ineligible route
• we have reached our daily limit of requests
• you have submitted your application outside of the service operating times
• your application is already in progress

Processing times

Eligible requests for priority service will be considered within 10 working days.

The 10 working day consideration period begins the working day following the date you paid the priority service fee and excludes weekends and public holidays. For example, if you pay the priority service fee on Monday, the 10 working days will begin on the next working day, Tuesday.

We may be unable to reach a decision within the 10 working day timescale if:

• you have not submitted all mandatory and supplementary documents

  • within 5 working days of paying the priority service fee if you are submitting your application or
  • if you are adding the priority service to an already submitted application you have not already submitted these documents
• you have failed to respond to a request for further information
• further checks are required to assess your case

If we cannot meet the service agreement for a priority application, we will write to the authorising officer by email. For this reason, please ensure the authorising officer checks their email, including junk mail, regularly.

If the service agreement is not met because:

• you have not submitted all mandatory and supplementary documents
• you have failed to respond to a further information request
• your case raises complex issues, and we require further time to assess these fully

we will not refund your priority service fee.

If your consideration is delayed for other reasons outside of normal case working processes (for example, a technical error), you may be eligible for a refund of your priority service fee.

The outcome of your application will be sent by email to the authorising officer listed on the licence application.

Fee

The fee for the priority service is £500 per request.

Contact

If you have any technical problems with the service, contact the business helpdesk:

• Telephone: 0300 1234699
• Email: businesshelpdesk@homeoffice.gov.uk