Scale-up

The Scale-up route permits UK businesses which have experienced recent high growth to obtain a Home Office sponsor licence to recruit highly skilled non-British or Irish citizens who ‘have the skills needed to enable the Scale-up business to continue growing’. It is an (initially) sponsored and nominally points-based route, and was introduced in the Immigration Rules, Appendix Scale-up on 22 August 2022.

The key eligibility criteria for an organisation applying for a Scale-up sponsor licence are that it must:

  1. have an annualised growth of at least 20% for the previous three-year period based on either employment (staff count) or turnover, and

  2. have had a minimum of ten employees at the start of the relevant three-year period

After a low take-up, on 13 April 2023, the Home Office launched an ‘Endorsing Body Pathway’ for organisations who do not meet the above eligibility criteria, because they have been established in the UK for less than three years and therefore do not have a sufficient HMRC footprint. Under this alternative, prospective sponsor applicants may apply for an endorsement from a Home Office-approved endorsing body and submit this with the licence application.

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Expired BRPs can be used for up to 18 months for various ID verification purposes

Various Home Office guidance documents have been amended on 27 March 2024 to confirm that expired Biometric Residence Permits (BRPs) and EU Settlement Scheme Biometric Residence Cards (BRCs) can be used for up to 18 months after the expiry date as a valid identity document for verification of immigration status purposes in various interactions with the Home Office, provided the holder still has valid leave. These include opening a UKVI account in order to access an eVisa, using the ‘UK Immigration: ID Check’ app to make an application, confirming that you are free from immigration time restrictions for the purposes of an application for citizenship, applying for change of conditions to obtain access to public funds, and sitting the Life in the UK test. This follows the coming the into force of amendments to the Immigration (Biometric Registration) Regulations 2008, SI 2008/3048 on the same date, which gives holders of expired BRPs who are under 70 years old a deadline of 18 months within which to replace their ex BRP with an eVisa. Appendix EU of the Immigration Rules is also being amended on 9 April 2025, further to Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules HC 733, to allow a non-EEA national applicant in an EUSS application to use a BRC or BRP for up to 18 months after its expiry as proof of identity and nationality and without having to re-enrol fingerprints. It remains the case that expired BRPs/BRCs can still only be used for travelling back to the UK until 1 June 2025 after which an eVisa will be required.

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