The UK Home Office has announced plans to offer an optional premium service for requests made through the Sponsor Management System (SMS). This service will allow Sponsors to pay a fee of £200 for expedited processing of certain types of requests including Certificate of Sponsorship allocation and Level 1 user appointment.

This service is being offered in an attempt to address the long processing times that many Sponsors have experienced when making routine requests through the SMS. In some instances, the Home Office has estimated as long as 18 weeks for the processing of requests. Such long wait times can be extremely burdensome on Sponsors who hope to hire recruits from outside of the UK to meet immediate staffing needs.

The law creating this new premium service will go into effect next month. From there, the Home Office will work toward implementation, but a specific timeline for when the service will be available to SMS users has not yet been announced.