The bricklayer starting on your job on Monday has worked for you, on and off, for nine years. You know which van is his. And in all that time, nobody at your firm has ever asked to see his passport — because why would they? He’s not staff. He’s a subbie. He sends you invoices.
From 1 October, none of that will be a reason.
The check, in plain English
A right to work check is the government making businesses do a piece of border control at the point of hiring. Before someone starts, you confirm they’re allowed to work in the UK. For a British or Irish passport holder that usually means seeing the passport itself — the original, in front of you, not a photo someone sent over. For most others it means a share code: a reference the Home Office gives a person so an employer can look up their immigration status online. Either way you keep a dated copy of what you saw, store it securely, and hang on to it for as long as they work for you and two years after.
Done properly, the check earns you a defence. The law calls it a statutory excuse — if the person turns out to be working illegally anyway, you don’t pay the penalty, because you did what was asked. Done sloppily, or not at all, there is no defence. The penalty runs up to £60,000 per person, and in serious cases it stops being a fine and becomes a criminal matter, with prison on the table.
Employers have lived with this for years. Your office almost certainly does it for every new starter without thinking. But the duty has only ever applied to employees — people on the payroll. The self-employed sat outside it. And construction runs on the self-employed more than almost any industry in the country.
What changes in October
The government has confirmed that from 1 October the scheme extends to businesses that engage individual subcontractors, agency workers and gig workers — gig meaning people picked up job by job through apps and platforms. A government minister has already singled out construction as a “high-risk sector” for Home Office attention. That is not a phrase to shrug at.
The scale is worth pausing on. Hudson Contract, a firm that pays construction subcontractors for a living, puts the arithmetic like this: if 900,000 self-employed operatives each work for three different firms in a year, that could mean 2.7 million checks. Their sums, not mine — but even if they’re half right, an industry that has never checked its subbies is about to start, all at once, this autumn.
One honest caveat. The fine detail is still settling, and there is a real line around people truly in business on their own account. A limited company subcontractor with its own gang, insurance and client list may sit differently from a self-employed bricklayer whose work all comes through you. If most of your labour arrives that way, take proper advice first. But if your firm engages individuals directly, the safe assumption is that this lands on you.
The check is easy. Every time is hard.
The check itself takes five minutes and costs nothing. That is the trap, because five-minute jobs are exactly the ones that don’t get done on a building site.
Think about how subbies actually arrive. The groundworks gang is short on Thursday, so the site manager rings a lad who’s worked for you before, and he’s on site at half seven Friday. The office finds out when his invoice turns up. Where, in that sequence, did anyone see a passport? Who copied it, dated it, filed it? If the answer is that the site manager took a photo on his phone and it’s in a WhatsApp thread somewhere — that isn’t a compliant check. A photo of a passport, on its own, earns you no defence at all.
And a check isn’t always a one-off. Someone whose permission to work is time-limited has to be checked again when it runs out. That is a diary problem, and diary problems are where construction admin goes to die.
A gate, not a platform
Regular readers will know I don’t reach for software by default, and I’m not going to sell you an “immigration compliance module.” What this needs is smaller and duller: a gate in a process you already run.
Every firm I audit has some version of an operative record — the list of who is allowed on which site, usually next to inductions and CSCS cards (the photo card showing a worker has passed the basic site safety test). The fix is to put the right to work check into that same record and make it load-bearing: nobody — employee, subbie, agency lad — gets marked ready for site until the record holds the evidence, the date, and the name of whoever checked it. If someone’s permission is time-limited, the record carries the re-check date and raises its hand before it arrives. The site manager doesn’t have to remember anything. The system won’t let him forget.
If you already run any kind of workforce list, that is three fields and a rule, not a new platform. If you run it on paper and a spreadsheet, it may still only be three columns and a Friday habit. The point is not the technology. The point is that “did we check him?” stops being a question answered with a shrug.
Where this doesn’t apply
If everyone on your sites is on your own payroll, you’re already doing these checks and October changes very little — just make sure casuals go through the same door. If all your labour comes through an agency or a payroll company that carries out compliant checks, the daily admin may not be yours — but ask them now to show you exactly how they do it, because “they handle all that” is thin comfort next to a £60,000 penalty. And if your subbie list is four blokes you’ve known twenty years, you don’t need software. You need an afternoon, a folder and a diary note. Do the checks once, properly, and file them.
For everyone else — the firms with thirty or sixty people across their sites and no clean line between staff, subbies and agency — the question to ask before October is simple. If the Home Office rang tomorrow and asked you to prove that everyone on your jobs is entitled to be there, how long would it take you to answer? If the honest answer is a shrug, that is the job for this summer. Get in touch.