Why this is the admin that can end an agency
Since the Health and Care Worker visa opened to social care roles in February 2022, thousands of UK home care agencies have taken on a second regulator without always noticing. Alongside CQC, CIW, the Care Inspectorate or RQIA, a licensed sponsor answers to UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), part of the Home Office. Unlike a care inspection, a UKVI compliance failure does not produce an action plan and a re-inspection date. It can produce a revoked licence, and with it the loss of every sponsored carer on the rota.
The uncomfortable part is that most licences are not lost to deliberate abuse. During the 2024-2025 compliance crackdown, home care agencies lost licences most commonly for inadequate record keeping, late or missing UKVI reports, or concerns about whether the sponsored vacancies were genuine. These are administrative failures, which means they are preventable, and mostly preventable with better systems rather than better intentions.
The five sponsor licence duties in plain English
The Home Office Sponsor Guidance runs to hundreds of pages, but for a home care agency sponsoring under SOC codes 6135 (Senior Care Worker) and 6136 (Care Worker), five duties carry nearly all the weight:
- Right to work checks, done before employment starts and repeated at visa expiry, with evidence retained.
- Record keeping, holding each sponsored worker's passport, visa, BRP or share code, contact details and attendance in a form you can produce for a UKVI audit.
- Reporting duties, telling UKVI about changes to a sponsored worker's circumstances within 10 working days.
- Genuine vacancies, only sponsoring roles that reflect real care demand, with no over-sponsoring.
- Cooperation with compliance visits, which can arrive unannounced.
Everything below is one of these five, seen from a different angle.
Record keeping: what UKVI expects you to produce
The record-keeping duty is where the day-to-day work sits. For each sponsored carer, an auditor will expect the full chain: the Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) reference, the role and salary it was assigned against, the visa and BRP or eVisa share code, English language proof, right to work evidence, current contact details, and attendance records that show the person is actually working the role they were sponsored for.
Two things make this harder than it sounds in a home care setting. First, the records change: carers move house, visas get renewed, share codes get re-issued, roles shift from Care Worker to Senior Care Worker. Static copies in a folder go stale without anyone noticing. Second, the attendance evidence is operational data. It lives in your rota and your visit records, not in the HR file, so a sponsor running visa admin on a spreadsheet has to reconcile two systems every time UKVI asks a question. That reconciliation gap is exactly where record-keeping findings come from.
Reporting duties: the 10 working day clock
UKVI requires sponsors to report most changes in a sponsored worker's circumstances within 10 working days, through the Sponsorship Management System (SMS), filed by your authorising officer or a Level 1 user. No software can file for you, and no software should claim to. The trigger events are the part agencies miss:
| Trigger event | Why it slips through |
|---|---|
| Address change | The carer tells their coordinator, who updates the rota system. Nobody tells whoever holds the SMS login. |
| Role change | A promotion from Care Worker to Senior Care Worker is an HR event in the office and a reportable event to UKVI. |
| Salary change | Pay reviews and changed hours both count. A drop below the visa threshold is a compliance problem as well as a report. |
| Employment ending | Resignations and dismissals get processed through payroll; the UKVI report is a separate step that has its own deadline. |
| Prolonged absence | Unexplained non-attendance is reportable, but only visible if someone is watching attendance against the rota. |
Notice the pattern: every trigger event is something your operational systems already know about before your compliance process does. The 10-day clock starts when the change happens, not when the office notices. That is why the practical fix is detection, wiring the events that already flow through the rota and the carer record into a queue someone is responsible for clearing.
Right to work checks: the statutory excuse
A compliant right to work check, done before employment starts and repeated at visa expiry, gives an employer a statutory excuse against a civil penalty if a worker later turns out not to have the right to work. The check itself follows the Home Office Right to Work Code of Practice: capture the share code, BRP or passport, verify it, and keep time-stamped evidence of when the check happened and who did it.
The failure mode for home care agencies is rarely the first check. It is the re-check. A carer hired in 2023 with a visa expiring in 2028 needs a diarised re-check five years after anyone last thought about it, usually after the person who did the original check has left. If your system does not carry the visa expiry date forward into someone's working day, the re-check simply does not happen, and the statutory excuse quietly lapses.
What a Home Office compliance visit looks at
Compliance visits can be unannounced, and they are evidence-led. In practice the auditor works through a documentation set that maps directly onto the duties above:
- The list of sponsored workers, reconciled against your CoS log
- Right to work evidence for each sponsored worker, initial checks and re-checks
- Salary records, checked against the salary stated on each CoS and the visa threshold
- Attendance records, showing the sponsored role is actually being worked
- The change reports you have filed with UKVI, matched against what actually changed
- Evidence that vacancies are genuine, that sponsorship reflects real care demand rather than ghost roles
On salary, the general Health and Care Worker minimum is the higher of £23,200 gross per year (as of April 2024) or the going rate for the SOC code, and the threshold has been rising, so current figures need checking on gov.uk before any CoS is issued. The genuineness question deserves particular attention because it is the hardest to evidence retrospectively: an auditor asking why you sponsored six carers last year wants to see the care demand those roles were filling, which for a domiciliary agency means rota and visit volume data, not a job advert.
Where software evidence changes the picture
None of the duties above can be delegated to software, but almost all of the evidence behind them can be generated by it. This is the design idea behind the homecareOS visa sponsorship module: the compliance trail should be a side-effect of normal operations, not a separate job. Concretely, that looks like:
- CoS allocation tracking. Each Certificate of Sponsorship tracked from request through assignment, visa application, grant, expiry and renewal, linked to the carer record, the role, the salary and the supporting documents.
- A right to work workflow. Share code, BRP or passport captured at onboarding, re-checked before visa expiry, time-stamped and stored against the carer record so every check produces a defensible statutory excuse.
- Visa expiry alerts. Six-month, three-month and 30-day warnings per carer, surfaced to the registered manager and to the carer through the mobile app, so the re-check and the renewal both happen on time.
- A staged 10-day reporting queue. The trigger events (address change, role change, salary change, employment ending, prolonged absence) detected from the systems that see them first, staged with the data needed to file through SMS, with an audit log of who did what and when.
- Genuine vacancy evidence. CoS assignments linked to real visit demand from the rota, demonstrating that sponsorship is filling actual care need.
- Salary threshold checks. Verification against the current minimum and the role's going rate, flagging if a sponsored carer's actual rota hours produce gross pay below threshold before it becomes a reporting issue.
- A UKVI audit pack. One-click export of the documentation set a compliance visit typically asks for: sponsored worker list, CoS log, right to work evidence, salary records, attendance, and change reports filed.
The common thread is that each item reuses data the agency already generates by scheduling visits, paying carers and keeping the carer record current. The sponsor licence work stops being a parallel spreadsheet universe and becomes a view over the operational system, which is also why the audit pack can exist at all.
The failure points that actually cost licences
Pulling the threads together, the recurring reasons home care agencies lose licences are unglamorous:
- Records that cannot be produced on the day. The documents exist somewhere, but not in a form an unannounced visit can be handed.
- Reports filed late or not at all. Usually because the trigger event was invisible to the person holding the SMS login.
- Genuineness-of-vacancy concerns. Sponsoring ahead of demand without being able to evidence the care hours behind the roles.
- Pay drifting below threshold. Reduced hours quietly taking a sponsored carer's gross pay under the visa minimum.
- Lapsed re-checks. Right to work evidence that was compliant at hiring and never refreshed at visa expiry.
The consequences are severe enough to state plainly, without dramatising them. Revocation means every sponsored carer typically has 60 days to find a new sponsor or leave the UK, and the agency faces a 5-year cooling-off period before it can apply for a new licence. Civil penalties for illegal working run to £45,000 per worker, rising to £60,000 for repeat offences, and the criminal offence of knowingly employing an illegal worker under Section 21 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 carries up to 5 years' imprisonment. The point of listing these is not fear; it is that every one of them sits downstream of the same administrative failures, and administrative failures respond to systems.
In summary
Sponsor licence compliance for a home care agency comes down to five duties, discharged continuously: check right to work, keep the records, report within 10 working days, sponsor genuine roles, and be ready for an unannounced visit. The agencies that hold their licences comfortably are not the ones with the thickest policy binders; they are the ones whose operational systems surface the trigger events and keep the evidence chain without anyone having to remember. International recruitment is likely to remain part of how the sector staffs itself, a theme we explore in our workforce essay, so the duty load is worth engineering properly rather than enduring.
If you want to see what that looks like in practice, the visa sponsorship feature page covers the full module, and it connects to the same platform that runs recruitment and four-nation compliance. For the wider picture of what one of these systems should cover, read our complete guide to domiciliary care software in the UK. Or Book a 15-minute demo and we'll walk through the CoS log, the right to work workflow and the 10-day reporting queue on a sample agency.