> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.onthepassconsultancy.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Right to Work Checks 2026: What UK Kitchens Must Do - URL: https://www.onthepassconsultancy.com/right-to-work-checks-2026/ - Published: 2026-09-10T09:00:11.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-10T09:00:10.000Z - Description: From the 1st of October 2026, UK Right to Work checks widen to cover agency and casual staff, not just employees. Here is what it means for your kitchen. - Author: René Chapman - Tags: Hospitality Life From the 1st of October 2026, Right to Work checks in the UK stretch to cover agency and casual staff, not just employees. Here is exactly what changes, and what it means for your kitchen. Most of the compliance you deal with, you can see. The EHO visit. The temperature logs. The [allergen matrix](https://www.onthepassconsultancy.com/natashas-law-the-essential-guide-to-food-allergen-labelling/) taped to the wall. This one you cannot see, and it lands on the 1st of October 2026, and a lot of good operators are going to walk straight into it. Not because they are careless. Because nobody told them. So let me tell you, in plain English, before it becomes your problem on a Saturday night with a section down and an agency chef you cannot legally use standing in your kitchen. ## What is actually changing? Right now, the Right to Work check, the one where you confirm someone can legally work in the UK before they start, only applies to people you take on as employees. Staff on a contract of employment. Everyone else has sat in a grey area. From the 1st of October 2026, that duty widens a long way. It reaches workers, individual sub-contractors, agency staff, and people you engage through an online platform or app. The legal engine behind it is Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, which became law on the 2nd of December 2025. Put simply: the pool of people you are now responsible for checking gets a great deal bigger. ## Why hospitality is in the firing line Think about how a kitchen actually staffs a busy service. A couple of employed chefs on the core rota. An agency commis when someone calls in sick at four o'clock. A pot wash who has been coming in for two years and everyone just treats as casual. Maybe a delivery rider working through an app. Under the old rules, most of those people were somebody else's paperwork, or nobody's. Under the new rules, if your business is the one the person is genuinely working for, the checking duty can be yours. Hospitality runs on exactly the flexible, last-minute, [agency-and-casual labour](https://www.onthepassconsultancy.com/labour-cost-in-catering-why-uk-operators-get-it-wrong/) this reform is aimed at. That is not bad luck. It is why the sector has been named directly in the guidance and warned to look at its labour supply chains now, not in October. ## The bit nearly everyone gets wrong Here is where operators will trip, and it is worth slowing right down. The rules do not catch everyone you pay. Someone genuinely in business on their own account, trading under their own name, invoicing several clients, free to send someone else in their place, stays outside the scope. The pastry consultant who bills three cafés from her own limited company is not someone you need to check. That is a real business, working for itself. But, and this is the part that matters most, calling someone self-employed does not make them self-employed. The Home Office has said plainly that it looks at how the work is really arranged, not at the label on the invoice. The kitchen porter who only works for you, turns up when you roster him, and cannot send a mate in his place is, in substance, in scope, whatever the paperwork says. It is not what you call the arrangement. It is how the arrangement actually works. That gap, between the label and the reality, is where small operators are most likely to get caught. If you have people you have always thought of as casual or self-employed but who in truth work only for you, on your terms, they are the ones to look at first. ## The good news, and there is some The duty is not retrospective. It applies to new arrangements that begin on or after the 1st of October 2026\. You do not have to go back and re-run checks on the team you already have in place. One caveat worth holding on to. If a casual or agency arrangement is going to roll on well past October, it is worth reviewing now rather than assuming it is grandfathered in for good. Where something ongoing clearly continues past the date, do not just file it under "already sorted". ## What a proper check actually involves For most non-British and non-Irish staff, this is now a quick online job, and that is genuinely the case. The person gives you a nine-character share code. You go to the government's employer service at gov.uk/view-right-to-work, put in the code and their date of birth, and check the photo the service shows you against the person standing in your kitchen. It has to be the employer-facing service. Not a screenshot they send you. Not their own status page. Get that part wrong and you lose the statutory excuse, which is the protection the check is supposed to buy you. Keep a dated copy on file. British and Irish citizens are a slightly different job, because they cannot use the online share code route. For them it stays a manual check of an original document, a passport being the straightforward one, seen in person or through the certified digital identity route. The principle is the same either way. You confirm the person is who they say they are, you confirm they can work, and you keep the evidence. Five minutes, done properly. The cost of not doing it is the next section. ## What it costs to get wrong The civil penalties are steep, and they are per worker, not per business. Up to £45,000 for a first breach in a three-year window, and up to £60,000 per worker for a repeat. Where an employer knowingly takes on someone with no right to work, that is a criminal matter carrying up to five years inside. I am quoting those figures as they have been reported by immigration specialists rather than reading them off the statute myself, so treat the exact numbers as the ballpark and confirm the current figure before you rely on it. The direction of travel, though, is not in any doubt. This is an expensive thing to get wrong, and it is expensive per head. ## What I would actually tell you to do before October You do not need a lawyer on retainer to get ahead of this. You need an afternoon and an honest look at your own operation. Here is where I would start: - Sit down with your rota and your last three months of invoices, and list every person doing work in your business who is not a straightforward employee. Agency, casual, sub-contractor, app-based, all of it. - For each one, ask the honest question: is this person genuinely running their own business, or do they in practice just work for me? If it is the second, they are likely in scope from October. - Fix your onboarding now, so that from the 1st of October 2026 nobody new starts a shift without a completed check on file. - Talk to your agencies and ask them, in writing, who is carrying the checking duty for the staff they send you. Do not assume it sits with them. - Point yourself at the GOV.UK guidance, and if your staffing is complicated, at a proper immigration adviser. On a change like this, an hour of good advice is a lot cheaper than one penalty. One thing I want to be straight about. This is not legal advice, and I am not an immigration lawyer. It is 35 years of watching this industry take compliance changes on the chin, put into plain English so you can see what is coming and act early. For your own situation, read the GOV.UK guidance and take proper advice. ## The bigger point The [operators who get hurt](https://www.onthepassconsultancy.com/4-to-6-uk-hospitality-businesses-close-every-day/) by changes like this are almost never the ones who set out to cut a corner. They are the ones who did not know, found out in October, and had a busy service to run and no time to deal with it. You have a few weeks. That is enough. Getting ahead of this costs you an afternoon with your rota and a couple of straight conversations with your agencies, and nothing else. Getting caught by it costs a great deal more. None of that is why you would ordinarily pick up the phone to On The Pass Consultancy. What I help you with is the kitchen itself, the layout, the equipment, the way the operation runs and where it quietly leaks money, from Newport to Swansea, Gloucester to Bristol, and UK-wide. But it all sits on the same foundation as this does: knowing your own operation properly, top to bottom, so nothing lands on you by surprise. If you would like an honest look at yours, the free initial consultation is open. No obligation, no hard sell, just an honest conversation about your operation. And if there is nothing I can add, I will tell you that too.