In 2025 alone, the Home Office issued 2,438 civil penalties for illegal working, totalling over £130 million in fines, with individual penalties reaching up to £60,000 per worker, sponsor licences revoked, businesses closed and directors disqualified. And that was before the law changed.
The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 received Royal Assent in December 2025. Section 48 substantially expands the scope of right to work checks and extends liability for illegal working along supply chains. The gap that has allowed alternative working arrangements to sit largely outside employer obligation is closed in law. Section 48 is not yet in force and no implementation date has been confirmed, but the legislation is settled.
Retail, consumer, food and beverage businesses rely heavily on the kinds of working arrangements this legislation was designed to capture. The question is not whether this will affect them, but how prepared they will be when it does.
Under existing law, all employers have a duty to prevent illegal working by ensuring employees have the legal right to work in the UK. Employers who fail to conduct checks correctly and are found to have employed illegal workers face civil penalties, or criminal sanctions where the breach was deliberate.
The framework has a notable gap. The obligation applies to employees, but does not extend to workers engaged through alternative arrangements such as those on zero-hours contracts or gig economy platforms. Where third parties supply the labour, the responsibility for right to work checks currently sits with them.
In practice, many businesses in this sector have built their onboarding processes around that gap. An agency supplies the worker, the agency runs the check. That assumption is about to become a liability.
Once implemented, Section 48 does two things that fundamentally alter the compliance landscape.
The first is scope. Currently, businesses engaging workers through non-traditional arrangements have no legal obligation to conduct right to work checks themselves. That responsibility sits with whoever supplies the labour, meaning the business directly benefiting from the work carries no verification duty at all. Once Section 48 is in force, that changes. The obligation extends to contractors, subcontractors, gig economy workers, zero-hours workers, and those on other non-traditional arrangements, whether engaged directly or indirectly.
The second is supply chain liability. Any business involved in the engagement of a worker could be deemed the employer, even without a direct contractual relationship. If an illegal worker is found anywhere in a supply chain, multiple businesses face liability simultaneously, with both the initial contractor and every subcontractor in the chain exposed regardless of whether they had any direct relationship with that worker.
That second point is the more significant shift for this sector. Businesses outsourcing cleaning, food delivery, security or temporary staffing have historically relied on contractual arrangements to allocate responsibility to the supplying party. Under Section 48, a contractual clause will not be enough. Businesses will need active compliance measures and evidence of verification throughout the chain.
Failure to conduct checks correctly could expose businesses to:
For businesses that rely on migrant workers, sponsor licence revocation carries a consequence beyond the financial, removing the ability to recruit the staff the operation depends on.
While these changes will be felt across all sectors, the impact falls hardest here.
Businesses in this space routinely rely on zero-hours contracts, seasonal workers, students and holiday workers to manage fluctuating demand. Every one of those individuals, British or foreign national, will need their right to work checked on or before their first day, regardless of employment status. For restaurants, cafes and retail operations with high staff turnover, the administrative scale of that is considerable.
The supply chain exposure compounds it. Outsourced cleaning, agency-supplied shift workers, third-party delivery contractors: if an illegal worker appears anywhere in those arrangements, liability extends to the business at the top of the chain, not just the one that engaged them directly. The Home Office has already concentrated enforcement on food delivery, hospitality and retail, and Section 48 extends that reach into working arrangements that have, until now, sat outside it entirely.
Section 48 has no confirmed commencement date, but the legislation is settled and businesses that act now will be in a stronger position than those that wait for a start date to be announced. The businesses that come through this well will not be the ones that updated a policy document when the start date was announced. They will be the ones that used this period to rebuild how compliance actually operates across their full workforce.
That means treating right to work not as a standalone check but as the foundation of a wider screening programme. Identity verification, criminal record checks, employment history and ongoing monitoring work together to give a complete picture of who is being engaged, across every worker type and every arrangement. Right to work tells you someone can work in the UK. A broader screening programme tells you who they are.
Giant Screening works with organisations managing exactly these challenges. High volume, multiple worker types, complex supply chains, fast-moving operations. We deliver the full screening programme, with right to work as the foundation and the identity verification, background checks and compliance monitoring that makes it defensible. If your workforce is structured in a way that Section 48 is designed to reach, talk to us before it does.