It is a legal obligation to ensure that ALL of your employees, regardless of nationality, have the right to work in the UK.
These checks must be completed before any work is carried out in your business.
You will have heard us talk a lot recently about the Fair Work Agency. With this coming into force in April, we will likely start to see more and more checks being carried out and fines galore being issued.
If you haven’t got your legal right to work documents on file, don’t panic; you can do it now. As long as you can evidence you did it as soon as you became aware, then that is what the FWA will want to see.
So whilst this isn’t the most exciting topic to be talking about, the point we want to make is be careful when talking to your employees about conducting right to work checks. Most importantly, do not single out the employees that you feel need checking.
Why? Because that is exactly what happened for one hotel in Cumbria. They singled out a Malaysian employee, asking them to produce their right to work documents in order to be paid. Aside from the fact they completely failed at due diligence in the first instance, they were then taken to a tribunal for race discrimination as they did not ask any others in the team for the same.
The real stinger here, though, is that the employee didn’t have the right to work in the UK, but the tribunal found the employee guilty of discrimination, ordering them to pay damages to the worker, and then they were fined £10,000 for failing to do their checks.
Get in touch with the team, and we can talk you through how to safely do your legal right to work checks and prevent numerous fines coming your way.
