A car wash in Slough is visited by immigration enforcement on a Saturday. Three of the six men working are found not to have permission to work. The owner produces a folder with photocopies of passports in it. Two of the copies are of documents that expired eighteen months ago, one was taken after the man started, and none is dated.
He has done something, which he thinks should count for something. It does not. The statutory excuse depends on doing the check in a prescribed way before employment begins and keeping the evidence in a prescribed form, and a folder of undated photocopies is not it.
The penalty is for employing, not for knowing
Under section 15 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, it is a civil offence to employ someone who does not have the right to do the work in question. It is a strict liability provision: you do not have to have known.
The civil penalty was raised sharply on 13 February 2024, to a maximum of £45,000 per illegal worker for a first breach and £60,000 per worker for repeat breaches. Those are maximums and the Home Office applies a scale, but the scale starts high. For the car wash, three workers is a number with five digits in it.
There is a separate criminal offence of employing someone knowing, or having reasonable cause to believe, that they do not have the right to work. That carries an unlimited fine and up to five years' imprisonment. Reasonable cause to believe is a lower bar than knowledge, and deliberately not asking is not a defence.
Other consequences follow. A sponsor licence can be revoked. Directors can be disqualified. Details of employers who receive penalties are published. And an alcohol or late night refreshment licence can be reviewed, which for a hospitality business is worse than the fine.
The statutory excuse is a specific procedure
If you carry out a correct check before employment begins, you have a statutory excuse against the civil penalty even if the documents later turn out to be forged, provided the forgery was not reasonably apparent. That excuse is the whole point of the exercise.
There are three routes and you must use the right one for the person in front of you.
A manual document check applies to people with acceptable documents from the Home Office lists, usually a British or Irish passport. You must obtain the original, check it in the presence of the holder, satisfy yourself that it is genuine and relates to that person, take a clear copy, and record the date you made the check. A video call is permitted for the presence element in some circumstances, provided the original is in the holder's hand and you can see it.
An online check applies to anyone with an eVisa or a digital immigration status, which now includes most people with limited leave. The individual gives you a share code and their date of birth, you use the Home Office employer checking service, and you retain the response, which includes their photograph. You cannot rely on a physical biometric residence permit for this group; the online check is the required route.
Identity document validation technology, carried out through a certified identity service provider, is available for British and Irish citizens who hold a valid passport. You still have to retain the IDSP's output and satisfy yourself that the photograph is of the person.
There is a fourth situation. Where someone has an outstanding application or appeal and cannot produce documents, you request a positive verification notice from the Home Office employer checking service, which gives an excuse for six months.
Follow-up checks are required where permission is time-limited. Diary the expiry date and repeat the check before it passes. Keep the evidence securely for the duration of employment and for two years after it ends, and record the date of the check on the copy.
Two further points. Check everybody, not only the people you think might need it, because checking selectively on the basis of appearance or name is race discrimination under the Equality Act 2010 and a claim in its own right. And the check is for employees, not for genuinely self-employed contractors, though the line between the two is not always where a business would like it to be.
A reference is optional, and inaccurate is worse than absent
There is no general legal duty to provide a reference. Some regulated sectors are different, notably financial services, where the regulatory reference regime applies. Outside those, you may decline.
If you do give one, you owe a duty of care. In Spring v Guardian Assurance the House of Lords held that an employer providing a reference owes a duty to the subject to take reasonable care that it is true, accurate and fair. A reference does not have to be comprehensive, but it must not give a misleading impression, including by what it leaves out. You also owe a duty to the recipient not to make negligent misstatements.
That is why the short factual reference has become standard: job title, dates of employment, and nothing else. It is safe and it is also, quite openly, a refusal to say anything. Requesters read a bare reference as a signal, which is a problem for the honest employer with a good leaver.
If you want to say more, keep to facts you can evidence. Attendance figures, live disciplinary sanctions and confirmed performance data are defensible. Opinions about character, speculation about why someone really left, and reference to a grievance they raised are not. Do not mention an allegation that was never tested, and be careful with health and absence information, which is special category data under the UK GDPR and can raise disability discrimination issues if it influences a hiring decision.
Have a policy and apply it identically to everybody. Giving a warm reference to one leaver and a two-line factual one to another is the fastest way to turn a reference into evidence.
Asking for references is a separate discipline. Ask in writing, ask the organisation rather than a friendly individual, and treat references as verification rather than assessment. They are useful for confirming dates and job titles and almost useless for predicting performance. The check that actually protects you from employing a fabricated career is asking for original qualification certificates and phoning the switchboard of the previous employer rather than the mobile number on the reference letter.
Where this shows up in the game
Business Baron runs right to work checks as a real step with a real cost in time, and it runs them against the rules in force that month. Skip them because you need someone on Monday and the exposure sits there until an inspection arrives. The penalty is not a flat fee: it scales with how many workers and whether you have been caught before, and a licensed trade can lose the licence on top. That includes the Saturday somebody turns up and asks to see your folder.