UK employers don’t always need a work visa for sponsored Creative Workers, Ross Kennedy explains

28 October 2024

The UK immigration system as it applies to the creative sector is a complicated hodgepodge of different categories, each with their own requirements and restrictions, advantages and disadvantages.  These include visitor-based routes, such as creative visitors, permit free festivals and permitted paid engagements, as well as the now ubiquitous sponsored work visa that has taken over immigration in the last couple of decades.

Workers can be sponsored under the Skilled Worker route for longer-term roles for a single employer which will meet the minimum skill and salary requirements.  However, this often doesn’t reflect how the creative sector works in the real world.  People are often freelance and don’t work solely for a single employer, moving from one gig or project to another within short periods.  In order to cater for this sector, sponsorship under the Creative Worker route can come from a wider range of organisations than just an employer, with broadcasters, productions companies and even agents or performance venues able to get a licence to sponsor Creative Workers.

As well as flexibility for the sponsor, the Creative Worker route can in certain circumstances also benefit from a concession for some nationalities that means they only need sponsorship – they don’t then need to apply for the visa to travel to the UK.

How the Creative Worker visa concession works

The concession is only available for non-visa nationals – those nationalities who would not need to apply for a visa to come to the UK as a Standard Visitor.  The nationalities that need visas to come to the UK as a Standard Visitor are listed in paragraph VN 1.1 of Appendix Visitor: Visa national list.  This means that any nationality that is not listed here may be able to benefit from the concession.

In addition to being a non-visa national, the total duration that the person is being sponsored for must be less than three months – this includes where the person has a single engagement or where they have consecutive engagements for which the total length of the engagements (including time between engagements) is three months or less.

The worker still needs to be sponsored under the Creative Worker route, so they still need to have a sponsor and to be assigned a Certificate of Sponsorship.  However, if they are a non-visa national and being sponsored for under three months, they do not need to apply for a visa before travelling – they can just present their Certificate of Sponsorship to a Border Force officer on arrival.

If a non-visa national is being sponsored for longer than three months, or if a visa national is being sponsored for any duration, they will need to apply for a visa before travelling to the UK.