Downgrade meaning

In October 2020, the claimant played the defendant’s Wild Hatter, a two-part game combining a fruit machine with a wheel of fortune. After triggering and completing the jackpot spin, her on-screen display announced a win of the ‘Monster Jackpot’, shown as £1,097,132.71. The case in Durber centred on the mismatch between what appeared on her screen and the operator’s server logs, resulting in a drastic downgrade in the payout from a purported Monster Jackpot exceeding £1m to a far smaller Daily Jackpot of £20,265.14. The claimant pursued the shortfall between that figure and the Monster Jackpot. The defendant maintained that a random number generator had in fact awarded only the Daily Jackpot, and that a fault affected the game’s animations, erroneously presenting an incorrect outcome. It relied on its terms and conditions and pointed to prior rulings in Parker-Grennan v Camelot UK Lotteries Ltd, [2024] EWCA Civ 185, and Green v Petfre (Gibraltar) Ltd (trading as Betfred), [2021] EWHC 842 (QB). What did the court say?...

In this issue Key developments UK immigration control: how it works Sponsored work Work sponsorship: sponsors Students EU law rights and EU settlement Challenging immigration decisions and enforcement Preventing illegal working Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content New Q&As Key developments Future developments—Immigration calendar Our Immigration calendar sets out key forthcoming developments for business immigration advisers. UK immigration control: how it works IHS rises to come into force from 6 February 2024 The Immigration (Health Charge) (Amendment) Order 2024, SI 2024/55, was made on 16 January 2024. Under article 1(2) of the Order, it comes into effect 21 days later, on 6 February 2024. The measure increases the Immigration Health Surcharge from £470 to £776 per annum for students, their dependants, Youth Mobility Scheme applicants and children under 18. For all other applications that must pay the Health Charge, the annual IHS rises from £624 to...

Sponsor licence revocation challenges: no need for a global assessment During the first half of 2024, the Administrative Court has delivered a series of inconsistent rulings on whether the Secretary of State for the Home Department (SSHD) must undertake a global assessment when deciding to revoke a sponsor licence. All the claims have featured care providers running care homes who have brought challenges to revocation decisions taken by the SSHD. In R (Supporting Care Ltd) v SSHD [2024] EWHC 68 (Admin) (19 January 2024), His Honour Judge Siddique quashed the SSHD’s decision on the single basis that he had ‘failed to conduct an adequately reasoned global assessment of all relevant considerations in deciding whether to revoke or downgrade the sponsor licence.’ (para [55]). The dispute concerned entirely the necessity for such holistic evaluation in sponsor licence revocation decision-making by the SSHD...

This Practice Note outlines the part ratings agencies play in the debt capital markets and sets out key documentary considerations for those agencies. Rating agencies and their role Rating agencies assign credit ratings to issuers of debt securities for public or private use. Issuers—whether corporate, sovereign, financial or other entities—may themselves be rated. That rating may equally apply to any debt securities they issue and are directly responsible for, where no credit enhancements are in place. Debt securities can be rated separately from the issuer where the issuer is a company created specifically to issue the debt (a special purpose vehicle (SPV)) or where the instruments benefit from credit enhancements (eg a guarantee) that strengthen them beyond the issuer’s standing rating. A credit rating is obtained on application by the issuer to one or more rating agencies. Rating agencies—key institutions The international credit ratings market is dominated by three major institutions: S&P, previously Standard & Poor’s Moody’s Fitch Ratings, known as...

Ratings outlooks and watch-lists Among the leading credit rating agencies (CRAs) are Moody’s Investors, Standard & Poor’s (S&P) and Fitch Ratings, which carry out periodic reviews of assigned ratings. They also publish rating outlooks—opinions on the likely direction of a rating over the medium term (typically the next 6 to 24 months)—which may be: positive negative stable developing or evolving An outlook usually explains the rationale and the possible scale of any change; in most cases, outlooks are stable. If an issuer’s credit profile is weakening and a payment default is anticipated, it may be moved to a negative outlook or placed on negative watch to signal that a downgrade could follow. Receiving a negative outlook or being added to a watch-list is not, in itself, a rating action, but it can foreshadow one. Watch-lists indicate that a rating is under review for a potential short‑term change (usually within 90 days), specifically: a possible upgrade ...

STOP PRESS This Practice Note is being updated to incorporate changes to the Sponsor Guidance that took effect on 6 March 2026. For a full breakdown, see News Analysis: Detailed list of Home Office’s Sponsor Guidance changes of 6 March 2026. This Practice Note sets out how a sponsor in the Workers and Temporary Workers routes may lose its licence or have it curtailed. These routes are: downgrading revocation suspension surrender by sponsor reduction of Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) allocation The applicable Home Office guidance for sponsors is the Workers and Temporary Workers Sponsor Guidance, with Part 3 in particular covering sponsor duties and compliance. In R (New London College Ltd) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (SSHD); R (West London Vocational Training College) v SSHD, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Immigration Act 1971 (IA 1971) provides general statutory authority for the SSHD to run a sponsor licensing regime, including vetting sponsors, through rules...