Visa routes for overseas entertainers have descended into farce. How they can be improved?

Being somewhat of a dinosaur (55) I can remember when the UK had a work permit system specific to entertainers and sportspeople. A little team of civil servants beavering away in an office near the Houses of Parliament, deciding who gets a work permit and who doesn’t. For two years I was one of those civil servants, before switching sides to help the music industry better manage its work permit applications.

Then, in 2008, the system changed completely to a sponsorship system. It is now the organiser, the production company, the concert promoter or booking agency that chooses which immigration route to use for their bands on tour, their actors appearing in films or stage plays, their comedians and their virtuoso cellists.

Instead of applying to a team specially trained to make decisions, it is the licensed UK sponsor who decides what paperwork to issue, how to fit into the framework of rules and guidance, who to sponsor and for how long. The sponsor holds the decision making power and they can be held accountable for those decisions.

There are in fact three routes sponsors can use: creative worker – temporary work visas, permitted paid engagements visitors, or visitors working at a “permit-free festival” (such as Glastonbury, whose organisers obtain a special exemption from the Home Office each year).

Overseas artists and their teams who want to work at a permit-free festival are able to enter under the standard visitor route. Those who are coming to work in any other capacity need to be sponsored or invited under the creative worker or permitted paid engagement visitor routes. 

I’m going to concentrate on those first two routes. These are routes where the UK sponsor or inviting party must issue specific paperwork the overseas artists will use, and both routes are currently in a bit of a bad way. 

Creative worker visas

The bulk of the tours that come to the UK are by well-established acts who have a support network of management, booking agents and promoters. They are mostly dealt with under the creative worker temporary visa route.

Creative workers are issued with a Certificate of Sponsorship which is a short-term work permit issued by the UK sponsor verifying that they are a genuine act of international status, listing the work they’re doing here and justifying each member of the entourage accompanying an artist. These can be issued in as little as one working day at relatively little cost. Most acts use these as entry documents; a border official should check the Certificate of Sponsorship numbers and stamp the passport on arrival.

This system has been in place for 16 years and there are some sponsors issuing thousands of Certificates of Sponsorship to creative workers each year, usually for acts who are here for just a few days. A huge artist like Taylor Swift can use over 200 Certificates of Sponsorship on one tour, so it’s easy to see how a big promoter or agency can get through thousands.

That all sounds fairly simple I suppose; log some data into a government server, pay a fee, and everything is sorted. The sponsor then tells the band or tour manager what to do with the Certificate of Sponsorship, which is: to show it when you arrive, declare you’re here to work, the officer then needs to check your unique Certificate of Sponsorship numbers online and stamp your passports, then take a photo of the stamps because we need them for our files.

It’s a system that should work well; it has done in the past. Where it starts to fall down is when airport staff and border officers don’t deal with the visas correctly at the border.

Frequently, agency staff (hired by the airports to keep the queues moving) tell Certificate of Sponsorship holders they can use the eGates (passport scanners) when in fact the guidance says they can’t. This circumvents the system as the Certificate of Sponsorship cannot be activated by the eGates. Using the eGates means the passengers don’t get their passports stamped, which usually renders their work illegal and sponsors can then be in trouble for non-compliance.

This started happening when the eGates were rolled out across the big UK airports in May 2019 and is still happening almost every day, five years later. eGates simply check identity and digitally record movements, they don’t ask questions, they don’t check documents, and they can’t be used by Certificate of Sponsorship holders.

Those agency staff directing people to these machines are seemingly given no training about the fact some categories of passenger can’t use them; they’re just told to get the queues down because it makes the airport look bad if people have to wait too long.

Over the last five years thousands of creative workers have been mishandled in this way. After an outcry from the live music sector in 2019 the Home Office grudgingly agreed to a ‘temporary’ fix whereby the sponsor can retrospectively ask for variance of leave, and that ‘temporary’ solution is still being used 5 years later.   

If the Certificate of Sponsorship holder is lucky enough to avoid the eGates and they get to see a Border Force officer, they should be dealt with correctly, right? Well, since 2019 the answer to that is increasingly “no”. A lot of border officers think they don’t need to stamp the passports anymore. There are posters on the walls of arrivals halls saying Certificate of Sponsorship holders must have their passports stamped, yet many officers don’t seem to know this.

I’ve heard tales of bands, actors, film directors etc. having blazing arguments with border officers who swear blind they “don’t need to stamp anymore”. Where this misconception comes from is anyone’s guess, but there definitely seems to be a lot of confusion.    

Changing rules and guidance

Sponsors such as booking agents, promoters, film production houses etc. are not only facing a stream of failings at the border; they’re also under pressure from the other side.  The Home Office frequently change the sponsor duties and amend their guidance to add new complications without notice or consultation.

A few examples of  the Home Office’s surprise updates and guidance amendments include:

• They suddenly stopped allowing sponsored artists to be paid in cash. It’s not illegal to pay a UK band in cash for a show, but an overseas band can’t be paid that way. This is often very inconvenient for club-level acts on tour; it would be handy for them to get a few hundred quid in local currency to pay for meals, drinks, fuel etc.  But that’s no longer an option. There was no consultation or warning of this change, so sponsors and their overseas acts just have to deal with it.  

• They got rid of an important exemption almost solely used by music sponsors which said they didn’t need to obtain a copy of the passport stamp if that person was working in the UK for less than 24 hours. Why they got rid of this is anyone’s guess; it should have been widened to weeks or even months.  

• In 2018, it was suddenly announced (overnight) that acts could no longer enter the UK through Ireland. The Home Office decided that an old system was against the rules and this made coming via Ireland the only route in the world that would mean a US band needed full work visas to travel onward to the UK. This immediately made Ireland an unattractive place to start a European tour, and some acts had to divert their routing. The Home Office told me I was wrong when I told them about the previous system, told me it had always been illegal, but it was only after the sector got some traction and publicity that the Home Office relented and created a get-around.

• They became fixated with national minimum wage which does not apply to bands on tour. This led to visas being refused where an artist or sponsor could not show proof each person was getting paid at minimum wage rate. This is connected to the fact they still assume band personnel are employees of the sponsor, despite being told many times that’s not accurate or appropriate.

In May 2024 they made a slew of changes, including a cultural shift away from the sponsor having to explain why the artist was not a threat to the UK workforce, in favour of explaining how each person in the act’s entourage makes a “unique contribution to creative life in the UK”.

I don’t object to the change (although the wording can be clunky when dealing with squads of set carpenters and techs on tour with a rock band) but I do object to the persistent lack of warning or consultation. This instant requirement to alter procedures or wordings is often hidden away within huge guidance manuals and the sponsor must seek them out, understand them and implement them immediately. Conversely when a sponsor asks the Home Office for something they must wait up to 18 weeks (this is their ‘service standard’).

These changes are also being made without consultation. The Home Office and Border Force have not consulted with the entertainment sector about immigration for at least 6 years. The sector has had zero input and therefore zero opportunities to demonstrate why these changes are having such a negative impact on the industry.

Paid Permitted Engagement visitors

The paid permitted engagements has descended into farce of late. This route used to be a standalone immigration route, whereby a band, a public speaker, an actor or a commentator can come to the UK for less than 30 days and do paid engagements without having to apply for a Certificate of Sponsorship, as long as they meet certain criteria. This can have some advantages over the Certificate of Sponsorship route as well as some drawbacks; it exists as an option.  

However, in February 2024, without consultation, the Home Office announced that the paid permitted engagement route was now rolled into the standard visitor route. This is confusing to everyone who tries to use it.

For instance, the old paid permitted engagements visa would have said you can do paid engagements for 30 days, but the new paid permitted engagements visitor visa says “work prohibited” even if you declared you were doing paid shows in your application form. This is frankly baffling.

Moreover, the immigration rules state that if a non-visa national wants to enter the UK under the paid permitted engagements visitor route, they must declare themselves on arrival and show evidence of how they qualify. But, since February, they are increasingly told to use eGates or just allowed to pass without their paperwork being looked at. I heard cases of this within a week of the paid permitted engagements category change. Initially I thought it was agency staff making these errors, but then I heard multiple reports it was Border Force officers.

Yet, if you check the actual immigration rules (as I did; Appendix V paragraph 13) they still say applicants must declare their intention and prove they meet the criteria. So, the Home Office is telling people to break their own rules.

Some very mixed messages come out of this. Entertainers and artists can enter with a visa that says “work prohibited”, but they’re allowed to work. Visitors can’t sell goods or services to the public, but a band can get paid for a show and sell their t-shirts too. Paid permitted engagements visitors must enter the UK via a border official and provide their evidence, but border officials are directing them to eGates and it is the sponsors who are held accountable for non-compliance. It’s a contradictory mess.

The creative worker Certificate of Sponsorship system only works some of the time (under an increasingly bad set of guidance and compliance rules), the paid permitted engagements route has become a farce, and a government department is advising people to break its own rules. In my 30-odd years in this business I’ve never known it so dysfunctional on so many fronts.

What can be done about it?

Firstly, let’s engage.

Six years is way too long to go without any engagement with those affected or with experience of these routes. I suggest that UK Visas and Immigration, Border Force and the Department for Media, Culture and Sport reinstate the Arts and Entertainment Taskforce that existed under the UK Border Agency. There must be seats at the table for the stakeholders; decisions cannot continue to be made in a vacuum by civil servants who know nothing of how this industry works.

Secondly, we need better policy and better guidance

The Home Office needs to stop denying there’s anything wrong with the system and stop making changes without consultation. Speak to us, listen to why our sector has different needs, and let’s work on mutually agreeable solutions to the many existing problems as well as routes to best practice on both sides.

The sector is desperate to be able to comply – but we need rules and guidance that are fit for purpose and to work out a way to make it simpler for frontline border officers to handle our acts too; everyone can win.

Thirdly, let’s have some common sense.

A sponsor cannot face potential fines of £10,000 per person for not having entry stamps when border officers are advising people who need a passport stamp that they don’t need it. The requirement to chase stamps should be dropped given that getting them is such a lottery.

Recognise that the booking agency sponsors do not employ the bands or crews. Accept that self-employed people are not subject to national minimum wage rules. Realise that cash is not necessarily an indicator that something dodgy is going on. Border Force need to be the arbiters of who gets into the country and what they are allowed to do when here; not agency staff hired by the airport.

These things all seem fixable, so let’s do it.