OISC renamed Immigration Advice Authority from 16 January 2025

The Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner, or OISC to everyone who knew it, is being renamed from today as the Immigration Advice Authority. A colourful new logo is also being deployed.

There is not a huge amount to say about it other than it is a pain.

It is a pain for all existing OISC firms and organisations, which will have to re-do all of their literature and websites and so on. The Immigration Advice Agency is setting a deadline of 2 June 2025 by which they expect organisations to have completed that exercise. Obviously, that imposes a cost on those organisations, the majority of which are not-for-profits.

It is a pain for us and other training providers as we all need to undergo a similar exercise and rename all our courses, rewrite all of our content referring to the OISC and so on. At Free Movement we have changed or are changing some of our content with effect from today and we’ll review the rest over the next few weeks.

It is a pain for advice-seekers, at least in the short term. Because no-one has ever heard of the Immigration Advice Authority before. The transition seems to have been a closely guarded secret with no prior public consultation.

Let’s hope it is all worth it. Why is the organisation doing this to itself? This is what they say:

Immigration is a top priority for the UK government, and with an increased demand for services, the lAA needs to build on the work of the OISC to enhance its capacity, increase public trust, and better serve those seeking immigration advice. Our new brand identity will reflect our bolder, more ambitious plans, add clarity to who we are, and demonstrate our threefold approach as an organisation that achieves its mission through regulation, enforcement and promoting best practice.

In the long term there’s no doubt that “Immigration Advice Authority” is much clearer than “Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner”, so it will hopefully help with the “who we are” bit, once the confusion eventually dies down, assuming it does die down.

But the rest of that seems to have been written by ChatGPT. What are the bolder, more ambitious plans and how the logo is going to help with them or how it demonstrates the three means of achieving the mission, whatever that mission is? I’ve looked through the OISC website and their old annual reports and I can’t tell you what the old “mission” was. Apparently, a new “vision, mission, and values have been developed” as well, so perhaps we’ll find out soon. As well as why the new name and logo was required for all this.

It all seems like a huge distraction from getting on with the day job. The money for the whole exercise apparently came out of existing budgets. The sort of rebrand sucks up huge management time and resources. Rather than being spent on, y’know, investigating and prosecuting rogue advisers.

To be fair, the record lowest number of convictions secured by the OISC in the last year for which statistics have been published — a single conviction, in fact — may reflect the success of the OISC in eliminating bad practice and preventing breaches of the regulatory regime occurring in the first place.

Or maybe not and some sort of serious reset is indeed required following several years of decline.