Wake-up call: are you up to date with visa laws?

Expert advice

Hospitality businesses are facing tremendous pressure with recruitment, staff retention and costs. Against this backdrop, parts of the sector are getting caught out making immigration mistakes. The Home Office can issue business-breaking fines, totalling many thousands of pounds, to companies that are found to be employing people illegally in the UK. A shift to greater enforcement action has resulted in well-publicised immigration troubles for employers, particularly restaurants and hotels.

The very basics of the law require that employers hiring staff must make sure that new hires have the correct immigration permission to work and that restrictions on this permission are observed. For example, only certain student visa holders can work, and most of these students are restricted to up to 20 hours of work per week during term-time. Employers that get these basics wrong are taking a gamble. 

To-do checklist

• Staff must have immigration permission to work in the UK – checks on immigration permission that satisfy the Home Office’s requirements must be completed for all staff before they start work. Visitors to the UK cannot work.
• Make sure restrictions on any visa holders are observed – not all visa holders have a right to work in the UK and some (such as students) will have restrictions on the number of hours they can work per week.
• Diarise the end of dates for permission of workers – permission for most visa holders will expire and it is important to ensure that employees do not inadvertently start working illegally in the UK once this happens.
• Ensure that responsibility for right to work checks is handed over following personnel changes – companies change and it is important to ensure tasks do not fall between the cracks. HR procedures, such as confirming that staff have the right to work, must be passed on should the person responsible for these leave the company.
• If the company has a sponsor licence, it is crucial that it complies with its sponsor duties – hospitality businesses are at a higher risk of scrutiny from UK Visas and Immigration through audits and other checks; any shortcomings in performing sponsor duties can result in the sponsor licence being revoked or downgraded, which will impact the permission of its sponsored workers.

Beware

Asides from the reputational harm and bad publicity that follows being found to have employed someone illegally in the UK, the fines that can be issued are so large that they can easily break a business and destroy its cashflow.

In February the fines for being found to have employed a person illegally were increased to £60,000 (which can be multiplied for each illegal worker). If a company is issued with a civil penalty and has a sponsor licence, the Home Office can take action to revoke the licence, which will impact sponsored visa holders, such as chefs and bar managers.

Contacts

Robert Houchill (rhouchill@kingsleynapley.co.uk) is a senior associate and Radhika Patel (rpatel@kingsleynapley.co.uk) is a senior paralegal in the immigration department of law firm Kingsley Napley LLP.

Photo: Mark Umbrella/Shutterstock