The future of Right to Work: why flexible hiring ecosystems need to prepare

By Sarah Croft | December 12, 2025 | News, Right to Work

Flexible work is now a key element of how the UK labour market operates in many sectors. From logistics to construction, care to hospitality, organisations rely on gig workers and multi-layered subcontracting networks to deliver services and keep things running.

But Right to Work (RtW) legislation hasn’t kept pace. It was designed for a more ‘traditional’ world where employers hired employees directly.

That’s why, in late 2025, the Home Office announced plans to modernise RtW rules to reflect the way work really happens today.

What’s being proposed?

The Home Office proposals to ‘broaden’ the Right to Work Scheme would extend the legal or ‘statutory’ duty to carry out RtW checks. Instead of applying only to ‘direct’ employees, the requirement would also cover many modern ‘worker’ relationships which have fallen outside of the current RtW regime, including:

• People engaged as ad-hoc or flexible workers, including many zero-hours arrangements.
• Individual subcontractors such as construction workers
• Digital or online platforms that match people to paid work

Put simply, if someone is carrying out work on behalf of a named organisation, even through intermediaries, their Right to Work will need to be verified. So, the repercussions of any new guidance are likely to be wide-ranging and affect most employers.

Why does it matter, and what operational changes follow?

It is widely understood that the Home Office is increasing enforcement against illegal working. However, for many businesses, the greater impact will come from the operational shift. Three areas stand out:

• Due diligence across the supply-chain will broaden. Organisations will need clear understanding of their entire workforce, including for those workers not directly on their payroll, and consider how to evidence RtW checks at each stage.
• Onboarding flows will need redesign. Gig and zero-hours hiring happens at pace. If checks sit in a manual back-office process, the risk of delay and error rises sharply. Businesses will need to consider a consistent, easy to deliver processes across their eco-system.
• Audit trails become essential. RtW checks must be consistent, centrally recorded, and easy to retrieve across the whole labour chain and may move beyond HR and into broader areas of operations and procurement. For many businesses, that will require stronger systems than they have today.

What are the potential risks?

If the proposed changes come into force, civil and criminal liability would be extended and a failure to carry out checks, or to prevent illegal working, could expose a business to the same penalties that currently apply to direct employers. This includes fines of up to £60,000 per illegal worker, reputational damage and, in serious cases, prosecution.

But the risk picture goes wider than fines alone:

• Scaled compliance exposure: in high-volume flexible hiring, even a small error rate could quickly translate into significant numbers.
• Operational disruption: if RtW check processes slow onboarding, organisations could miss shifts, delay delivery, or fail to meet customer SLAs.
• Reputational damage: even if a failure happens deep in the supply chain, the spotlight would be turned onto the main contractor.

Why a digital-first approach is essential

Organisations engaging zero-hours workers, subcontractors or gig workers often share the same hiring realities: fast onboarding, high churn and short engagements. Those conditions make manual RtW processes difficult to sustain.

A digital-first RtW approach, such that provided by TrustID, is no longer a nice to have. It is the only scalable way to stay compliant without compromising hiring speed or worker experience.

The TrustID service enables:

• Near-instant eligibility verification
• A consistent process regardless of hiring route
• Simple reporting, evidence retention, and audit readiness
• A smoother, lower-friction worker journey

What to do next

Even before final guidance is issued, organisations can take some practical steps now to prepare their onboarding processes, protecting themselves from potential risk and minimising future disruption:

• Map labour pathways. Identify every route through which individuals deliver work for your business, including indirect and subcontracted routes.
• Clarify ownership. Make RtW responsibility explicit. Be clear on who checks, who stores evidence, and who triggers rechecks for repeat engagements.
• Standardise evidence and retention. Ensure everyone responsible for checks follows the same process and records outcomes in a consistent way.

Conclusion

Whilst we await the outcome of the latest consultation, the proposed extension of the RtW regime highlights a clear direction of travel: employers need to take responsibility for making sure everyone working under your brand is legally allowed to do so. Right to Work compliance isn’t just a tick‑box statutory duty and will increasingly become a signal that an organisation takes its social and legal responsibilities seriously in a fast‑moving, interconnected labour market. Businesses that react early, by tightening due diligence, clarifying contracts, and embedding compliance into everyday processes, will be better placed to navigate the next phase of workforce regulation confidently and without disruption.