The right to work duty may now be yours even if nobody on your books is an employee

Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 came into force this morning. It extends the duty to check a person's right to work beyond employees, to people engaged under a worker's contract, individual sub-contractors, and anyone found through an online service that keeps a register and charges a fee.

Three moves.

Check who you engage, not just who you employ. If somebody does work for you personally, and you are not simply their client or customer, the duty may now sit with you. That reaches contractors, agency temps and some people paid directly to work in or on your home. The government's own assessment puts £14 million of this cost on households over ten years, and gives no estimate of how many households are in it.

Keep the record, not only the check. The protection from a penalty comes from having carried out a prescribed check before the work started, and being able to show later that you did. A check you cannot evidence is a check you did not do. The civil penalty starts at £45,000 for each worker on a first breach.

If an app has stopped you, put it in writing today. Ask which check failed and on what date. Platforms have run identity and right to work checks voluntarily since July 2025, and none of them publishes how often those checks wrongly stop somebody. A dated written request is what moves a company's own appeal process, and it is the only record you will hold if it does not move.

The finished employer's guidance was published this morning and runs to 83 pages. The government costs reading it at between 35 and 171 minutes.

The Quernal provides general information, not legal or financial advice.