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on December 22, 2024
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One of the key legal requirements imposed on UK employers is the obligation to undertake a ‘right to work’ check on every UK-based employee. The purpose of this process is to ascertain that the employee has the necessary permission to carry out work for the given employer.
By undertaking such checks, employers can fulfil their duty to prevent illegal working in the UK. If you fail to satisfy this duty, you could be putting your organisation at risk of severe consequences, including Home Office enforcement action and hefty fines.
In this article, then, we will take a closer look at exactly what a ‘right to work’ check is. We will also set out some of the most important things for a UK employer to know about this process, and how Cranbrook Legal can help you fulfil your obligations.
If you are a UK employer, you do not have a choice on whether to conduct a ‘right to work’ check on your employees. It is a mandatory requirement to undertake this check on all your employees, to verify that they are legally entitled to work in the UK.
If someone applies for a job with your organisation and you are interested in hiring them, you must check their right to work in the UK before you employ them.
‘Right to work’ checks were introduced in the UK in 1997, as part of the Asylum and Immigration Act. This legislation put in place a requirement for employers to check their employees’ immigration status, to confirm there was no legal bar against them working in the UK.
The specific ways in which these checks need to be carried out have evolved over the years, with the aim of making the requirements more rigorous. A particularly significant development came in 2019, with the launch of the online Right to Work Checking Service.
Employers can learn more about the ‘right to work’ provisions by:
It is the duty of UK employers to keep themselves informed and satisfy their obligations under the most recent relevant guidance.
There are various ways in which you might carry out a right to work check on an employee, in line with UK Government guidance. They can be broadly summed up as follows:
As an employer, you will not need to conduct right to work checks on existing employees from the European Union (EU), the European Economic Area (EEA), or Switzerland if they came to the UK prior to 1st July 2021.
To reiterate what we stated above, a manual right to work check involves checking the employee or job applicant’s original documents. If you carry out this type of check, you must:
When you are conducting a manual right to work check, you will need to ascertain that:
If the applicant or employee is not a British or Irish citizen, it will also be necessary for you to confirm that:
If there is a time limit on the applicant or employee’s legal entitlement to work in the UK, you will need to examine their documents again when it is due to expire.
Certain British or Irish citizens on whom you wish to conduct a right to work check may be beyond the scope of the Home Office’s online service.
In this case, you may decide to turn to a certified digital identity service provider (IDSP) to undertake remote digital identity checks on the given individual – and their documentation – on your behalf. This is accomplished using identity document validation technology (IDVT).
Further information about IDVT can be found in the employer’s guide to right to work checks published by UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI).
If you wish to hire someone who is not a British or Irish citizen, they can prove their right to work in the UK by giving you their share code. They can use the Home Office’s online service to obtain this.
As long as you have this share code and the employee or applicant’s date of birth, you will be able to use the GOV.UK right to work service to check that they are legally entitled to work in the UK. This service will tell you:
Please note that British and Irish citizens are not able to obtain a share code. Instead, you can do your own manual check of their physical documents, or use an IDSP as described above.
It may be the case from time to time that you are unable to check a particular employee or potential employee’s immigration status by examining their physical documents or checking their status online.
This may be the situation if, for example, they:
If this is the case for a certain job applicant or employee of yours, the Home Office makes available a free online service known as the Employer Checking Service (ECS). This enables you, as an employer, to ask the Home Office to check the individual’s immigration status. You can make this request to the department via the GOV.UK website.
The exact documents that are acceptable as “proof” of a particular individual’s right to work in the UK, will depend on such factors as the person’s nationality and the type of check that is being undertaken.
For example, if a manual right to work check is being carried out on someone who has a continuous right to work in the UK (such as a British or Irish citizen), one example of an acceptable document would be a passport indicating that the holder is a British citizen or a citizen of the UK and Colonies having the right of abode in the UK.
On the other hand, the given employee or potential employee may have a temporary right to work in the UK. In this case, the below could be examples of acceptable documents:
The above is not an exhaustive list of acceptable forms of “proof” of right to work in the UK. Our experts in UK immigration law at Cranbrook Legal would always advise employers to consult UKVI’s most recently updated right to work checklist to guide their own checks.
In our position as an award-winning and renowned UK immigration firm, we can help you fulfil your legal obligations when it comes to right to work checks on your employees and potential employees.
The forms of assistance we can provide include the following:
To learn more about how our friendly, skilled, and knowledgeable specialists in UK immigration law at Cranbrook Legal can help your organisation carry out right to work checks and fulfil all its associated legal obligations, please contact us today. You are welcome to call us on 0208 215 0053, or to complete and submit our online contact form to arrange a free consultation.
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