Law firm Hill Dickinson’s latest ‘Immigration Spotlight’—published this morning—confirms that several headline measures announced in March’s Statement of Changes are now live. Chief among them: sponsors must ensure that every Skilled Worker’s salary meets the going-rate in each individual pay period, not just on an annualised basis; failure can trigger urgent licence audits. The article also unpacks the Home Office’s first use of a ‘visa brake’, an emergency power that on 26 March began blocking offshore applications from nationals of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan for certain routes (student, and in Afghanistan’s case, Skilled Worker). Existing visa-holders are unaffected, but new certificates of sponsorship issued to those nationals will be unusable until the brake is lifted. Other immediate changes include higher English-language requirements for settlement (ILR) from March 2027 and the expansion of the Global Talent visa to cover design professionals from 1 July. The briefing warns HR teams to log into the Sponsor Management System at least monthly—now a formal duty—and to extend right-to-work checks to contractors, not just employees. Employers should audit payroll systems, update recruitment collateral for affected nationalities, and brief finance teams on the risk of retrospective underpayment findings that could jeopardise sponsor licences.
Source: Hill Dickinson
