Vanessa Ganguin Immigration Law's Senior Client Manager Ross Kennedy explains the Creative Worker visa concession in an article for Free Movement.
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.
In addition to being a non-visa national, the total duration that the person is being sponsored for must be less than three months.
Read the full article in Free Movement
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