The importance of ensuring your employees have a legal right to work in the UK

Amba

Under current legislation, every company in the UK has a legal obligation to ensure their employees have a legal right to work in the UK. This issue is often shrouded in confusion, with ever-changing legislation surrounding the right to work, it’s easy for employers to make mistakes.

Now, the government is cracking down on illegal workers more than ever and there is greater scrutiny on employers. With ‘right to work’ checks being simplified, failure to comply with the legislation can result in a £20,000 fine and in some extreme cases, criminal proceedings.

Immigration Bill

New legislation currently being pushed through parliament will bring many changes to the current legislation. This Immigration Bill reinforces the notion that employers should take responsibility for checking the right to work status of those people that they employ and add a new level of severity for those who break the rules. If implemented, this legislation gives immigration officers the power to issue an immediate illegal working closure notice which, when enforced, can effectively close a business down for a maximum of 48 hours.

One key change that the Immigration Bill is seeking to implement is to make it easier to convict offenders by tightening the rules that determine when a worker has been illegally employed. In its current form, an offence is committed when an employer knowingly employs somebody with no legal right to work in the UK. The new legislation seeks to change this, so that an offence is committed if an employer had ‘reasonable cause to believe’ that someone had been working illegally, with the maximum sentence being increased from two to five years.

Mistakes to avoid

It is all too easy for employers to get too comfy and forget to check their employees’ right to work, make sure you avoid making some of the most common mistakes:

  • Forgetting to record the date a check was carried out.
  • Not making follow up checks within the correct time frame.
  • Not retaining evidence of right to work for the correct period of time.
  • Not checking the work restrictions of an employee who is a student.
  • Making unclear or incomplete copies of right to work evidence.
  • Conducting checks after the employee has started rather than before.

If you would like some expert advice on any of the issues in this article, please do not hesitate to give us a call on 01454 808658 and one of our friendly and experienced team will be happy to help.