UK immigration change: is it enough for the UK tech sector?
The UK’s tech and information sector is going from strength to strength, directly benefitting the UK economy with tangible effects such as job creation. However, amongst all the talk of London’s Silicon Roundabout now rivalling the USA’s Silicon Valley, there is also a growing fear that a genuine shortage of IT professionals could soon derail the UK tech industry’s continued expansion.
But should more be done to enable the UK to retain its title as the new digital powerhouse?
The government recently acknowledged that specialist technology roles are in short supply and, in a move to support the UK’s digital economy, amended the UK’s immigration policy to allow the sector greater flexibility in recruiting specialist skills from overseas. As a consequence, the following four IT roles have been newly added to the Tier 2 Shortage Occupation List:
- IT product manager;
- Systems engineer;
- Data Scientist; and
- Cyber security specialist.
This new allowance enables UK employers to speed up the recruitment process for these roles. As with other classified ‘shortage’ occupations such as civil engineers and medical practitioners, employers are no longer required to advertise the vacancy ahead of recruiting tech-savvy individuals from overseas. Under the government’s Tier 2 sponsor licence scheme, employers will also see these applications prioritised within the current migrant worker ‘quota’.
Considering that the UK’s booming tech sector anticipates the creation of 46,000 new jobs in London alone over the next 10 years, this announcement came as very good news indeed.
Beneath the eye-catching headlines, however, the government has placed a number of pre-conditions on using this approach that cannot be ignored and could leave some employers wondering whether the new measures are actually more of a hindrance than a help.
Only qualifying companies will benefit from the new rules
Only ‘qualifying companies’ may reap the benefits of the inclusion of technology roles on the Shortage Occupations List. To qualify, UK firms must:
- Be a small or medium sized company employing between 20 and 250 employees (if your business has fewer than 20 employees, you can still qualify if a letter of endorsement from UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) can be supplied);
- Be independent in the UK (ie. the the company may not be more than 25% owned by a company which has one or more other establishments in the UK); and
- Not have been established in the UK for the purpose of supplying services exclusively to another company in the UK.
As many UK start-ups are comparatively small from a headcount perspective, the need to secure a UKTI letter of endorsement will be an absolute necessity if they are to be seen as a ‘qualifying company’. This may be straightforward for those few companies that have an existing relationship with the UKTI ,however as it is not compulsory for start-up business in the UK to engage with the UKTI, many fledging tech firms with fewer than 20 staff will be struggle to meet this set criteria.
In addition, any company that is more than 25% owned by a larger company will not be considered as ‘qualified’. Many UK businesses utilising investment from blue-chip organisations will therefore also fall short of the aforementioned requirements.
UK employers will also need to prove the candidate’s role-specific experience
For those UK employers that actually meet the ‘qualifying company’ criteria, there are yet more hurdles which they must overcome.
Since each of the tech roles added to the Shortage Occupations List relates to a person with a minimum of five years’ relevant experience, demonstrable of having led a team, prospective UK employers seeking to hire tech professionals via the shortage occupation list must therefore also be able to:
- Retain references from the chosen migrant’s past employer(s) detailing the required experience and provide these to the Home Office on request; and
- Retain evidence which demonstrates:
– why the job demands this experience, ie. what elements of the job require this experience;
– why the job could not be satisfactorily carried out by someone with less experience; and
– how the sponsor would expect a settled worker to gain this experience before being appointed to the post.
Whilst this requirement makes perfect sense, many employers will find it a challenge to acquire valid evidence of the migrant’s demonstrable experience. Most employment references state little more than a start and an end date, with written statements relating to a person’s actual duties and responsibilities being rare.
This fact may be lost on the Home Office policy makers but UK employers should be wary of ignoring this requirement, and consider the potentially serious consequences of being deemed non-compliant for not retaining the necessary evidence.
So much reform, so little change
For many UK employers within the digital sector, the inclusion of these four roles on the shortage occupation lists will therefore prove to be quite restrictive.
Once employers take stock of the government’s caveats, many will come to view the conditions imposed as too challenging to meet.
Unfortunately, with the government preoccupied on drastically reducing net migration and a further clamp down on skilled immigration on the horizon, any policy revision that would assist a thriving tech UK economy to recruit the skilled professionals they need from overseas is looking extremely unlikely.
