Right to work checks are a legal requirement for every employer in the UK — but for security companies, the stakes are higher than in most industries. Deploying a guard who does not have the legal right to work in the UK can result in a civil penalty of up to £60,000 per illegal worker, criminal prosecution for directors, and the loss of your SIA-approved contractor status. For a security firm, that last consequence alone could end the business.
For ACS compliance, this is important. This guide explains how right to work checks work, what changed after Brexit and with the digital verification system, and how security companies should integrate these checks into their onboarding and ongoing compliance processes.
What Is a Right to Work Check?
A right to work check is the process employers must complete before an employee starts work — and in some cases, on an ongoing basis — to verify that the person has permission to work in the UK.
The check creates a “statutory excuse”. If you complete the check correctly and in good faith, and the documents or digital check appear genuine, you have a defence against a civil penalty even if the worker later turns out to have been working illegally. If you don’t complete the check — or complete it incorrectly — there is no defence.
The Home Office can issue civil penalties of up to £60,000 per illegal worker (increased from £20,000 in 2024). The penalty is per individual, so a company caught with five illegal workers faces a potential bill of £300,000 before any criminal charges are considered.
The Three Types of Right to Work Check
1. Manual document checks
The original method: the employee presents original documents from the Home Office’s List A or List B. You check them, confirm they appear genuine, take a copy, and record the date. List A documents (such as a British passport) give indefinite permission to work. List B documents (such as a Biometric Residence Permit with a time-limited right to work) require follow-up checks when the permission expires.
Manual checks are still valid but carry practical risk — a copy of a fraudulent document that looks genuine won’t help you unless the check process was correctly followed in every other respect.
2. Online Home Office checks
For employees with a Biometric Residence Permit (BRP), a Biometric Residence Card (BRC), or settled/pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme, you must use the Home Office online checking service at gov.uk. The employee generates a share code which you use to view their status in real time.
Post-Brexit, this is now the only valid check method for EU, EEA, and Swiss nationals — manual document checks of EU passports or ID cards are not sufficient to create a statutory excuse for these workers.
3. Identity Document Validation Technology (IDVT)
Since April 2022, employers can use certified Identity Document Validation Technology (IDVT) providers to conduct digital right to work checks for British and Irish citizens. The IDVT provider checks the document digitally, performs facial matching, and confirms the result. This removes the need for in-person document inspection for this category of worker.
IDVT checks are particularly useful for security companies onboarding guards remotely or quickly — but you must use a certified provider from the Home Office’s list of certified suppliers.
What Changed After Brexit
EU nationals living in the UK before 31 December 2020 needed to apply under the EU Settlement Scheme. Those with settled status have permanent right to work; those with pre-settled status have time-limited permission that must be monitored.
Key points for security companies:
- You cannot ask EU, EEA, or Swiss nationals to prove their status using a physical EU passport or national ID card — you must use the online share code system.
- Guards with pre-settled status have time-limited permission. You need a follow-up check date in your system and a process to trigger that check before expiry.
- Guards who arrived after 31 December 2020 need to have leave granted under the points-based immigration system — typically a Skilled Worker visa for permanent employment, though the security sector’s pay rates make qualifying for this route difficult.
- Conducting a discriminatory check — asking only non-British-sounding employees for documents — is unlawful. The check must be applied consistently to everyone.
Ongoing Monitoring: The Part Most Companies Get Wrong
For guards with time-limited right to work (List B documents, pre-settled status, or any visa with an expiry date), a one-off check at onboarding is not enough. You must:
- Record the expiry date of the worker’s right to work permission
- Conduct a follow-up check before that expiry date
- Not deploy the worker if a follow-up check cannot be completed and their permission has expired
In a large security company with guards on various visa types, pre-settled status, and BRPs with staggered expiry dates, this is a significant administrative challenge. The risk is that a guard’s permission expires unnoticed, they continue working, and you lose your statutory excuse for the period after expiry.
This is not a theoretical risk. It’s one of the most common right to work failures identified in Home Office enforcement visits.
Right to Work and SIA Licensing: The Double Compliance Check
Security guards must hold a valid SIA licence to perform licensable activities. The SIA licensing process includes its own immigration checks — an applicant must have the right to work in the UK to obtain a licence. However, there are two important points:
- An SIA licence is not proof of right to work. A guard may hold a licence obtained under previously valid permission that has since expired. Relying on an SIA licence as a proxy for a right to work check is not a valid approach and does not create a statutory excuse.
- Both checks are required simultaneously. You must verify right to work independently, regardless of SIA licence status.
The SIA Public Register also tracks licence validity separately from immigration status, so a licence appearing as “active” on the register does not confirm current right to work.
Record-Keeping Requirements
For every employee, you must retain:
- A clear copy of the documents checked (both sides, where relevant)
- The date the check was carried out
- For online checks: confirmation of the check result (the Home Office service provides a confirmation page)
- For IDVT checks: confirmation from the certified provider
- Follow-up check results and dates for time-limited permissions
Records must be kept for the duration of employment and for two years after the employment ends.
The Hostile Environment and Discrimination Risk
There’s a tension at the heart of right to work compliance: the law requires you to check everyone, but checking in a way that targets people based on their appearance or perceived nationality is unlawful race discrimination.
The Equality Act 2010 prohibits treating job applicants or employees less favourably because of their race — and selective document checking is one of the clearest ways this manifests in practice. You must apply the same check, at the same stage, to every single candidate or employee, regardless of their name, appearance, accent, or any other protected characteristic.
A useful practical rule: if you can’t describe a written procedure that applies identically to every hire, your process has a discrimination risk built in.
How TacDesk Supports Right to Work Compliance
Right to work compliance for security companies is primarily a data and process management challenge. You need to:
- Record what check was conducted, when, and what the result was
- Track expiry dates and trigger follow-up checks in advance
- Prevent scheduling of guards whose right to work cannot be confirmed
- Maintain records that satisfy Home Office requirements for two years post-employment
TacDesk’s guard management platform provides:
- Document and compliance record storage for each guard profile — right to work check results, document copies, and check dates stored securely alongside SIA licence records
- Automated expiry alerts — the system flags upcoming right to work expiry dates with configurable lead times, so follow-up checks happen before permission lapses
- Deployability gating — guards with expired or unconfirmed right to work permission can be automatically excluded from scheduling until compliance is restored
- Audit trail — every compliance check event is logged with timestamps, supporting the record-keeping requirements for Home Office inspection
A Right to Work Checklist for UK Security Companies
- Complete a right to work check for every new hire before their first shift — no exceptions
- Use the online Home Office service for EU, EEA, and Swiss nationals — a physical EU passport is not sufficient
- Use a certified IDVT provider for digital checks on British and Irish citizens (optional but operationally efficient)
- Record the check type, date, result, and document details for every check
- Log expiry dates for all time-limited permissions and schedule follow-up checks in advance
- Do not deploy any guard on licensable duties until both right to work and SIA licence status are confirmed
- Apply the check process consistently to all employees — document your process in writing
- Retain records for two years after employment ends
The Bottom Line
Right to work compliance in the security industry is one of those areas where the consequences of failure are disproportionately severe. A £60,000 penalty per illegal worker is not theoretical — it’s enforced. And the loss of ACS accreditation or SIA-approved contractor status would be catastrophic for any established security firm.
The good news is that compliance here is entirely manageable with the right systems. The check process itself is straightforward. What trips companies up is the ongoing monitoring — the follow-up checks that need to happen months or years after onboarding, triggered by expiry dates that need to be tracked reliably across a large, mobile workforce.
TacDesk handles that for you automatically. See it in action — book a demo today.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a qualified immigration solicitor or visit the Home Office employer guidance at gov.uk.