A haulage business runs on trust - keys to a £100,000 truck, a load worth more, a customer’s reputation in the back. But one check outranks all the others in legal weight, and it happens before the driver ever sees the cab: the right to work check. Employ someone without the legal right to work in the UK, without doing the check properly, and the liability is the employer’s.
GOV.UK’s guidance on checking a job applicant’s right to work puts the obligation plainly: you must check that a job applicant is allowed to work for you in the UK before you employ them. Not after the first week, not once the agency paperwork arrives - before employment starts. And the page states the consequence with equal plainness: you could face a civil penalty if you employ an illegal worker and have not carried out a correct right to work check.
Note the shape of that: the penalty attaches to the combination - an illegal worker plus a check that was not done correctly. The correct check is the shield. Done properly, it is also your statutory excuse; done sloppily or not at all, it is nothing.
The guidance offers two main ways to run the check. You can check the applicant’s right to work online, if they have given you their share code - the applicant generates the code from their own account and hands it over, and the online service confirms their status. Or you can check the applicant’s original documents.
One group sits outside the online route entirely: British and Irish citizens cannot get an online share code to prove their right to work. For them you check original documents - the page gives the passport or passport card as examples - or use an identity service provider. The majority of a typical driving workforce goes down the document route for exactly this reason.
The guidance sets out the manual check in three steps. Ask to see the applicant’s original documents - and note what has changed: you can no longer accept biometric residence cards or permits, so for anyone who would previously have waved one, ask for a share code instead. Then check that the documents are valid with the applicant present - the point of presence is that the photo on the document must be the person standing in your office. Finally, make and keep copies of the documents and record the date you made the check.
The page’s standard for what you are verifying deserves quoting in spirit: the documents must be genuine, original and unchanged, and belong to the person who has given them to you. A photocopy of a passport emailed by an agency is none of those things.
The industry’s habits create specific failure modes. Agency drivers who “come with the paperwork sorted” - the agency’s check may exist, but if you are the employer in law, the duty and the penalty risk are yours, and blind reliance on someone else’s process is not the statutory excuse. Drivers taken on at short notice for peak work, where the check gets skipped in the scramble to cover the run. And documents copied but never actually compared to the human in front of the photocopier, which fails the “with the applicant present” requirement entirely.
The check only protects you if you can prove it happened. That is why the guidance builds copying and date-recording into the document route itself: make and keep copies of the documents, and record the date you made the check. Months or years later, when a question lands about a driver long since moved on, the file with dated copies is the difference between a five-minute answer and a civil penalty argument. Keep right-to-work records with the same care as licence checks and tacho records - in the driver file, dated, retrievable, and reviewed when someone’s status or documents change.
The businesses that get this right are not the ones with the biggest HR departments - they are the ones where the check is never skipped, whoever is hiring and however busy the yard is.
Build the check into the offer, not the first day. Share code in hand or original documents on the desk, applicant present, copies made, date recorded, file closed. It takes minutes per hire, it is the same minutes every time, and it converts a civil penalty risk into a filed record. In a compliance-heavy business, this is the cheapest control you will ever run.