A recruitment agency in Bristol places a healthcare assistant at a care home for a 12-week assignment. The care home assumes the agency conducted the right to work check. The agency's onboarding team is confident they checked the worker's documents when she registered six months ago. But nobody has verified that the worker's visa — a Graduate visa with a fixed expiry date — is still valid today.
The visa expired three weeks ago. The worker is still on assignment. Both the agency and the care home are now employing an illegal worker. The civil penalty applies to both. Up to £45,000 each for a first offence. Up to £60,000 each for a repeat.
Neither intended to break the law. Both assumed the other was handling it. This is the "who checked?" problem, and it sits at the heart of why recruitment agencies carry a disproportionate level of compliance risk compared to direct employers.
The structural exposure
Recruitment agencies occupy a unique position in the UK employment landscape. They are employers — they put people on their payroll, pay them, and have legal obligations towards them. But they also supply those workers to clients who direct their day-to-day work. This dual relationship creates a compliance model that is inherently more complex than direct employment.
When you hire someone directly, the compliance trail is linear. You advertise, interview, check right to work, offer, onboard. One employer, one worker, one set of obligations.
When an agency supplies a worker, the compliance trail splits. The agency checks right to work at registration. The client receives the worker and puts them on site. Months later, when a visa expires or a document needs re-checking, whose obligation is it? In legal terms, it is both. In practice, it often falls to neither.
The UK has approximately 1.1 million agency and temporary workers at any given time. They work in warehouses, care homes, offices, construction sites, and hospitality venues. The verification gap between what the agency checked at registration and what the client verifies at arrival is where the compliance risk concentrates.
The "who checked?" problem
The Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 requires agencies to take "reasonably practicable steps" to verify a worker's identity and right to work before providing them to a client. This is a legal obligation.
Separately, the client — the end hirer — also has a right to work obligation. The Home Office employer's guide makes clear that every employer must establish a statutory excuse for every person they employ, regardless of how that person was sourced.
In theory, both parties check. In practice, a pattern emerges:
The agency's perspective: "We checked when the worker registered. We have the documents on file. If the client needs more, they should conduct their own check."
The client's perspective: "We use an agency precisely so we don't have to deal with compliance paperwork. That's what we're paying the agency fee for."
The result: A worker arrives at a client site with a registration check that may be months old, and a client that conducts no check at all. If anything has changed — a visa has expired, a document was fraudulent, or the worker has been substituted — nobody catches it at the point of arrival.
Why agencies face higher risk
Several factors compound the compliance exposure for recruitment agencies specifically.
Volume and velocity
A mid-sized recruitment agency might place 200-500 workers per month across dozens of client sites. Each placement requires a compliant right to work record. The sheer volume means that even a small error rate — 2% of checks missed or incomplete — translates into 4-10 non-compliant placements per month. At £45,000 per offence, the financial exposure accumulates rapidly.
The velocity of placements adds to the pressure. A care home calls at 3pm needing a night shift carer by 9pm. A warehouse needs 15 additional pickers for a Monday morning surge. The commercial pressure to fill shifts fast creates an environment where compliance shortcuts are tempting — and common.
Re-verification gaps
An agency conducts a right to work check when a worker registers. But workers can be on an agency's books for months or years, placed across multiple assignments, with their immigration status changing in between.
A worker who had a valid Graduate visa when they registered in January may have an expired visa by September. If the agency's system does not track and prompt re-verification based on visa expiry dates, the worker continues to be placed with an out-of-date check. The statutory excuse the agency obtained at registration has lapsed.
This is the gap that catches agencies most frequently. The initial check was done properly. But nobody went back to check whether it was still valid.
Multi-client complexity
When a worker is placed across multiple clients, the compliance record needs to be maintained centrally by the agency and accessible for each client's own compliance needs. If Client A asks for proof that the worker supplied to them was right-to-work checked, the agency needs to produce it. If the worker is placed at five different clients in a quarter, the agency needs to be confident that every placement was backed by a valid check at the time.
This multi-client model is also where substitution risk arises. A worker calls in sick. The agency sends a replacement. The client expected Person A and received Person B. If Person B's right to work status is different from Person A's — or if Person B has not been checked at all — the compliance failure is immediate.
FWA and gangmasters scope
The Fair Work Agency, launched in April 2026, absorbed the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) and the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate. Recruitment agencies are now directly within the FWA's enforcement scope.
This matters because the FWA's consolidated intelligence means that a minimum wage complaint from a worker at a client site can surface a right to work compliance gap at the agency. The FWA's walk-in audit powers mean that agency offices — not just client sites — can be visited without notice. And the FWA's information-sharing mandate means that a finding at one agency can trigger sector-wide scrutiny.
For agencies that operate in sectors already under heightened compliance pressure — care, logistics, food processing, agriculture — the enforcement risk is amplified further.
The Gangmasters (Licensing) Act obligations
Agencies that supply workers in agriculture, shellfish gathering, food processing, or packaging must hold a GLAA licence (now under FWA administration). Operating without a licence, or supplying workers in breach of licence conditions, is a criminal offence.
But even agencies outside the GLAA's traditional scope are subject to the Conduct Regulations. These require agencies to:
- Verify identity and right to work before supplying a worker
- Provide workers with written terms of engagement
- Not charge fees to workers (since 2018, under the Employment Agencies Act 1973 as amended)
- Maintain records of all workers supplied, including right to work documentation
The FWA's expanded remit means that enforcement of these obligations — previously handled by the under-resourced Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate — is likely to be more consistent and more proactive.
What agencies should do
1. Treat every placement as a new compliance event
The check conducted at registration is the baseline, not the ceiling. Before every placement — or at a defined regular interval for ongoing assignments — verify that the worker's right to work status is current. For workers with time-limited permission, this means checking the visa expiry date and conducting a fresh verification before each new assignment if the previous check's validity has lapsed.
2. Build an audit trail that survives scrutiny
For every worker, maintain a centralised, timestamped record of: what was checked, when, by whom, what documents were presented, the outcome, and the next re-check date (for time-limited permission). This record should be accessible for any client's due diligence enquiry and for any regulatory inspection.
3. Automate expiry tracking
If you supply workers on Graduate visas, Skilled Worker visas, dependent visas, or any other time-limited permission, you are tracking a dynamic compliance requirement. Manual tracking with spreadsheets will fail at scale. Automated alerts — triggered at 90, 60, and 30 days before expiry — ensure that lapsed checks do not become lapsed compliance.
4. Close the substitution gap
Implement a process for last-minute substitutions that includes real-time verification at point of arrival. When the client was expecting Worker A and Worker B arrives instead, the compliance check should be immediate and documented. The current model — where substitutions happen informally and are regularised after the fact — is a liability.
5. Define compliance responsibilities with clients
Your client contracts should clearly state who is responsible for what. This does not eliminate your own obligations — you still need to conduct your own checks — but it ensures that clients understand they also have a statutory obligation and cannot outsource it entirely to you.
The strongest position for an agency is to be able to say: "We checked. We can prove we checked. And we can produce the record immediately." If the client also checked, so much the better. If they did not, at least your own statutory excuse is intact.
The commercial opportunity
There is a counterintuitive upside to getting compliance right. In a market where clients are increasingly aware of their own compliance exposure — driven by FWA enforcement, sector-specific revocations, and rising penalties — an agency that can demonstrate robust, auditable compliance is a competitive advantage.
Clients choosing between two agencies at similar price points will increasingly ask: "What is your compliance process? Can you show me the audit trail for workers you have supplied to us? How do you track visa expiry dates?"
The agency that answers those questions confidently — with systems, not reassurances — wins the contract.
Certifyd's Right to Work Portal gives recruitment agencies centralised, auditable compliance records for every worker across every client placement. Real-time verification, automated expiry tracking, and instant audit-ready reporting — built for the volume, velocity, and complexity that agency compliance demands. Learn more about Certifyd for recruitment.