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Imam and Khatib of Jamia Islamia Ghousia, Westbourne Road, Luton, Maulana Qazi Abdul Aziz Chishti MBE, while addressing the Khatm-ul-Quran gathering, said that we are fortunate that Allah Almighty has given us the blessed month of Ramadan. He congratulated Qari Muhammad Shafiqur-ur-Rehman on getting the privilege of reciting the Holy Quran in Taraweeh prayers in his beautiful voice. Maulana Qazi Abdul Aziz Chishti, while explaining the virtues of Laylatul Qadr, said that this night is better and more excellent than a thousand months. In this night, the mercy and forgiveness of Allah Almighty are at their peak. May Allah Almighty give us the courage to reap the blessings and blessings of this night. On this occasion, a large gathering offered special prayers for the unity and harmony of the Islamic world and the security and survival of Pakistan and also prayed for the success of the armed forces of Pakistan.

Ramsha Shahid

A recent immigration dispute raises serious legal questions about whether the Home Office can retain Immigration Skills Charges for unused sponsorships simply because a sponsor licence was later revoked.
A recent immigration dispute has exposed an important fault line in the Home Office’s sponsorship regime: can the government lawfully retain Immigration Skills Charges paid for Certificates of Sponsorship that were never used, simply because a sponsor licence was later revoked?
The case itself cannot be publicly identified. What can be examined, however, is the legal question it raises and it is one that could affect a large number of UK employers.
The dispute concerned an employer sponsor seeking refunds of Immigration Skills Charges (ISC) paid in respect of multiple Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS). Those certificates were ultimately never used. Despite that, the Home Office initially refused to refund the charges, relying on sponsor guidance which states that refunds will not normally be issued where a sponsor licence has been revoked. That position was repeated in the Home Office’s response to a Pre Action Protocol challenge.
What followed is telling. After the legal challenge was issued, the Home Office agreed to refund the relevant ISC sums in that particular case. Crucially, however, the department declined to concede that its wider policy was unlawful. Instead, the Home Office stated that the refund was appropriate only because, at the time the refund request was made, the sponsor licence had not yet been formally revoked. The guidance also contemplated that refund decisions should ordinarily be made within 90 days.
The practical result was that the sponsor recovered the money. But the reasoning behind the refund reveals a deeper legal tension. The Home Office appears to be treating sponsor licence revocation case law as if it automatically determines questions about Immigration Skills Charge refunds. In legal terms, those are two distinct issues.
The Immigration Skills Charge is imposed under section 70A of the Immigration Act 2014 and regulated by the Immigration Skills Charge Regulations 2017. Importantly, the Regulations expressly allow the Secretary of State to refund or waive all or part of the charge. Parliament therefore did not create a rigid no refund regime. It created a statutory scheme which includes an express discretionary power.
The Explanatory Memorandum accompanying the Regulations also sheds light on the policy purpose behind the charge. The Immigration Skills Charge was introduced to encourage employers to invest in training and upskilling the resident workforce and to reduce long term reliance on migrant labour. The charge is therefore linked to the recruitment of sponsored workers.
This statutory structure matters. Where a Certificate of Sponsorship is never used and no worker actually commences employment, the connection between the charge and its policy purpose becomes far less obvious. The legal question is therefore not simply whether the Home Office can be strict with sponsors. It is whether a blanket refusal of refunds based solely on later licence revocation represents a lawful exercise of the discretion granted under the 2017 Regulations.
In its Pre Action Protocol response, the Home Office relied on well known authorities concerning the sponsor licensing system. These included Prestwick Care Ltd v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWCA Civ 184, New London College Ltd v SSHD [2013] UKSC 51, and St Andrew’s College v SSHD [2018] EWCA Civ 2496. Those cases emphasise that the sponsorship system operates on trust and that the Secretary of State is entitled to enforce compliance with a relatively “light trigger”.
As a general statement about sponsor licence enforcement, that proposition is uncontroversial. However, its relevance to Immigration Skills Charge refunds is less clear. The authorities cited concern the legality of the sponsor licensing regime and the Secretary of State’s power to revoke licences. They do not address the exercise of a financial discretion to refund statutory charges under the 2017 Regulations.
That distinction is significant. A sponsor licence revocation is a regulatory enforcement decision within immigration control. A decision to refund an ISC payment is an administrative financial decision taken under a different statutory mechanism. Treating those questions as interchangeable risks importing the logic of enforcement into an area where Parliament deliberately preserved discretion. Put simply, strictness in revocation does not automatically justify refusal of refunds.
The reliance on New London College is particularly notable. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the sponsorship regime but also emphasised that the Secretary of State cannot operate policies inconsistent with the statutory framework or Immigration Rules. That principle cuts both ways. While it confirms that the sponsorship system itself is lawful, it also means that executive guidance must remain consistent with the legislation that governs it.
In this context, that legislation includes the Immigration Skills Charge Regulations, which explicitly provide for refunds and waivers. If guidance is applied so rigidly that licence revocation effectively becomes an automatic bar to refunds, there is a risk that the discretion Parliament intended to preserve is being unlawfully narrowed. Public law has long recognised that decision makers cannot fetter a statutory discretion through rigid policy.
Similar difficulties arise with reliance on Prestwick Care and St Andrew’s College. Those decisions reinforce the courts’ reluctance to interfere with sponsor compliance decisions and recognise the Home Office’s broad latitude in maintaining the integrity of the sponsorship system. But a refund dispute is not simply a second challenge to a licence revocation wearing a different label. The legal question is different. It concerns whether the Home Office may retain a statutory charge paid for sponsorship that never resulted in recruitment, by applying a blanket policy tied solely to the later revocation of the sponsor licence.
Several factors suggest that the issue deserves closer scrutiny. The ISC Regulations preserve a refund discretion. The policy purpose of the charge is tied to skills investment and sponsored recruitment, not simply sanctioning non compliant sponsors. The Home Office’s own correspondence in the recent case acknowledged that timing matters: if a refund decision should have been made before revocation, the later revocation cannot simply be treated as decisive. Treating all revocations identically also risks collapsing very different factual scenarios into the same outcome.
The strongest critique of the current approach is not based on fairness alone. It is based on statutory coherence. The Explanatory Memorandum makes clear that the charge exists to incentivise domestic skills investment and applies in relation to sponsored workers recruited by employers. Where no worker is ever recruited and the Certificate of Sponsorship is unused, the policy justification for retaining the charge becomes more difficult to sustain.
That does not automatically mean every refusal is unlawful. But it does make blanket refusal policies harder to defend as rational exercises of discretion. There is also an issue of sequencing. If the relevant refund decision ought to have been taken within a defined timeframe, and during that period the sponsor licence had not yet been revoked, relying on later revocation may appear less like principled decision making and more like administrative convenience.
For many employers, particularly in sectors such as social care, the issue is far from theoretical. Organisations across the UK have paid significant Immigration Skills Charges in recent years. Some may have accepted refund refusals without challenge, assuming that licence revocation automatically ended the matter. That assumption may not always be correct.
Where refund refusals occurred within the past three years, particularly in cases involving unused Certificates of Sponsorship or timing issues in decision making, there may still be scope for legal review.
The broader lesson is simple. The Home Office is entitled to regulate sponsorship robustly. But robustness in one part of the regime does not remove the obligation to exercise statutory discretion lawfully in another. A sponsor licence may indeed be a privilege. But a refund discretion, once granted by law, remains a discretion that must be exercised according to law.

London: Mr Rich Beer, Chief Executive England Hockey Called on Pak High Commissioner Dr Faisal to discuss mutual collaboration in the field of Hockey as well as matters related to the upcoming FIH Hockey Pro League to be held in London. Pakistan Hockey team will also be a part of this tournament along with teams from other countries. High Commissioner assured Mr. Beer of full cooperation regarding the event and expressed the hope that Pakistan Hockey team will perform well in the tournament.

News desk:
Every NHS hospital in England has been told to improve patient waiting times for planned treatment as the government has made hitting the 18-week target one of its key priorities for this parliament.
By the end of March 2026, the government wants to see, external at least 65% of patients waiting no longer than 18 weeks.
To get there, every NHS trust must either get to 60% or improve on its November 2024 figures by five percentage points – whichever is greater. That is just a stepping stone towards the ultimate goal of achieving 92% by July 2029.

By monitoring desk:
The number of meningitis infections linked to Kent continues to grow, with five confirmed new cases on Wednesday, in what experts have described as the quickest-growing outbreak of the disease they have seen.
The UK Health Security Agency said that as of 5pm on Tuesday there were 20 cases of invasive meningococcal disease, up from 15. Nine have been confirmed in the laboratory, while a further 11 are under investigation. Six are confirmed to be the meningitis B strain, also known as MenB, which is the most common form of invasive meningococcal disease. Experts said the number of cases in such a short space of time was unprecedented.

Report: Zain Ali Khan: 
Britain’s jobs market is facing growing pressure as global tensions threaten to worsen the outlook for workers across the country. The ongoing conflict in Iran could deepen the UK’s employment crisis, potentially pushing more than 100,000 additional people out of work, economists have warned. The unemployment rate is already at a five year high of 5.2 per cent, but experts believe it could rise above 5.5 per cent in the coming months.
Rising instability in the Middle East is expected to drive up energy costs, placing further strain on businesses and forcing some employers to cut jobs. If this happens, the total number of unemployed people in Britain could move close to two million.
The figures highlight how the UK labour market is weakening. Britain now has a higher unemployment rate than Italy, which has traditionally been seen as one of Europe’s weaker economies. It is the first time this has happened since the 2008 financial crisis. Analysts warn that Donald Trump’s military intervention in Iran is creating conditions that will inevitably worsen labour market conditions.
James Smith, an economist at investment bank ING, indicated that the duration of elevated energy prices would prove decisive for employment outcomes. “It depends how long energy prices stay high. If we’re in a scenario where the disruption lasts three months or so, then I would imagine unemployment would be pushing above 5.5per cent,” he said.
Employers facing sustained cost pressures would likely respond by reducing headcount or halting recruitment altogether, Mr Smith explained.
Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden is set to announce a £1billion package on Monday, aiming to incentivise employers to hire young people and create 200,000 jobs.
This “new deal” seeks to reverse the growing number of “Neets” – young people not in education, employment or training. The initiative includes a new Youth Jobs Grant, offering businesses £3,000 for each 18-24 year old hired who has been unemployed for six months or more, supporting an estimated 60,000 individuals.