Who is licensed to sponsor a "skilled worker"?
The Home Office register of Worker and Temporary Worker sponsors, matched to Companies House and scored for the cases where the "skilled" label does not survive a look at the business.
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The register tripled
The Worker and Temporary Worker sponsor register has grown without an official time series to track it. Reconstructed from National Archives snapshots, the count of licensed sponsors has more than tripled since 2022.
The map
Each pin is a licensed sponsor, placed at its Companies House registered office and shaded by an implausibility score. The map opens on the low-skill-ceiling sectors; switch the filter to see the rest. Scores and flags are shown only where the sponsor name is an exact Companies House match.
Worst by score
A 0–100 implausibility score from the negative signals a sponsor stacks: a low-skill-ceiling sector, a company set up after the route opened, dormant or micro accounts, dissolved or insolvent status, a renamed entity, a shared director or address with other sponsors, or a B-rating warning.
| Sponsor | Score | Flags |
|---|
By sector
Sectors where a "Skilled Worker" sponsor licence is least plausible. Care is excluded from that judgement: care workers are on the shortage list, so the care total is shown but not treated as implausible.
Sponsorship mills
One person directing many sponsoring companies is a sponsorship factory rather than a cluster of independent businesses. A shared registered office is a weaker signal: very high counts are usually a formation agent or virtual office (flagged below), where hundreds of unrelated businesses buy the same mailing address. The shared-director links are the ones that prove a single operator. Counted only across exact Companies House matches.
| Director | Sponsor companies |
|---|
| Registered office | Sponsors at this address |
|---|