Where the right to work check belongs on a restaurant careers page

GOV.UK puts the duty in a single line:

The employer's guide turns it into the condition on the defence, which is where timing bites:

Three routes follow: a manual document check, a digital verification service check for British and Irish citizens who hold a valid passport, and a Home Office online check. All of them have to be finished before the person starts, and where one is not ready the guide's answer is to delay the start date — expensive, against a rota drawn up on Sunday night. The earliest point a restaurant can ask an applicant anything is the careers page. What is gained is total: "You will not have to pay the civil penalty if you can show you made the correct right to work checks."

The employer's guide sets out the range in one list. The last limb is one hospitality operators tend not to have seen:

GOV.UK's penalties page adds the reputational limb: "Your business's details may be published by Immigration Enforcement as a warning to other businesses not to employ illegal workers."

Neither page gives a first-breach figure; both stop at the £60,000 ceiling. The tiers live in the statutory Code of practice on preventing illegal working:

Those are starting points before reductions rather than fixed fines, and the code is statutory: "The County Court (and equivalent in Scotland) is required to determine appeals against liability for a civil penalty by having regard to this code of practice."

The cheaper mistake on a web page is not the missed check but the selective one, and the Home Office publishes a separate statutory code for it. Two of its rules decide what a careers form may look like. First, stage:

Second, route:

The guide says the same from the employer's side — "You cannot mandate how an individual proves their right to work." — and lists consistency first among what an employer should do: "be consistent in how you conduct right to work checks on all prospective employees, including British citizens".

A page whose only right-to-work field is "share code" excludes a large group of applicants: "British and Irish citizens cannot get an online share code to prove their right to work. You'll need to check their original documents - for example, their passport or passport card - or use an identity service provider instead."

Getting this half wrong is not capped the way the civil penalty is: a tribunal "will normally order the employer to pay compensation, for which there is no upper limit". The discrimination code also reaches the advertisement itself: "The Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Northern Ireland Equality Commission can also take regulatory action against you if you publish a discriminatory advertisement or instruct or induce another person (including an employment or recruitment agency) to discriminate."

The authority for putting anything on the form sits in that same code:

Invited, in the application. Note what it does not say: it asks for no documents, and makes the code no condition of applying.

Nor does it make the form the check. The share code is generated by the applicant for a single purpose and is time-limited: "The share code will be valid for 90 calendar days from the point it has been issued and can be used as many times as needed within that time." Only a code beginning with W evidences right to work, and the employer must still run the check on the service using the applicant's date of birth.

One boundary follows, and it is the guide rather than the summary that draws it. GOV.UK's short page at gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work says to "Check that the documents are valid with the applicant present." The guide sets out what being present means, and it is wider than a room:

An applicant who cannot get to the restaurant can still be checked manually: the guide contemplates documents arriving by post and the check happening over a live video link. What it refuses is the copy — physical possession of the originals is required either way, and inspecting a faxed or scanned copy is ruled out in terms. An uploaded scan cannot be the check, so inviting uploads collects immigration documents from applicants who will never be hired and establishes nothing. Apart from a narrow case where an identity service provider checks British and Irish passport holders, a check performed by a third party such as a recruitment agency does not create the statutory excuse for the employer.

All of that collapses into a short block under the form, plus one optional field. A version staying inside the sources quoted above reads roughly like this:

"Before employment starts" states the deadline the statutory excuse runs to, and the same check for every applicant at the same stage is the discrimination code's rule written where an applicant can see it. Naming all three routes answers the instruction that an employer cannot mandate how a person proves their right to work, and marking the field optional stops a share-code box behaving as a filter.

The retention rule in the guide is written around employment, not around applications:

Two things there get missed. The tail has an end: the file is destroyed, not archived. And the record has to be dated — "You may face a civil penalty if you do not record the date on which the check was performed."

None of that describes a share code sent by somebody who was never hired. Unsuccessful applicants get no two-year tail in the guidance opened here, and GOV.UK's instruction on the point is short: "Make sure you follow data protection law." A restaurant already setting retention periods for booking records and staff hours has the habit; the applicant pile is the one that never gets a period set for it.

Three documents quoted here are mid-revision on GOV.UK today — the practical argument for wording that can be changed in an afternoon.

The employer's guide publication page now lists a "Draft employer's guide to right to work checks: 16 July 2026 PDF , 2.13 MB , 72 pages" above the operative version. The version still in force is the 26 June 2025 accessible HTML, and every quotation from the guide here comes from it.

The discrimination code is further along. Its publication page carries a "DRAFT Code of practice for employers: avoiding unlawful discrimination while preventing illegal working: October 2026 (accessible version)" under an update note which ends: "Aligned with current legislation and applies from 1 October 2026." The code quoted above is the one in force from 6 April 2022. The penalties code sits in the same state, with a draft above the 13 February 2024 version that supplied the £45,000 and £60,000 starting points.

A page that must be rewritten when a code of practice commences is one the restaurant needs to edit itself, without a support ticket or an agency's release window. TableSpark is built for that posture. The Starter plan is published as "For one restaurant that needs to launch direct and stay easy to update.", and plans from Growth upward include "Custom domain + managed SSL", so the page sits on the restaurant's own domain rather than on a job board that owns the wording and the applicant relationship.

The check itself stays where the law puts it: with the employer, before employment commences, off the web page entirely. No such promise is made here that a website form performs a prescribed check, holds right-to-work evidence, or creates a statutory excuse. The search-readiness work TableSpark packages into the site — structured content, canonical URLs, sitemaps, robots controls, Restaurant and LocalBusiness schema and managed search verification — matters here for a plainer reason than rankings: a careers page nobody can find recruits nobody.

The careers page is the first place a restaurant can put the same question to every applicant, in writing, at the same stage — before a rota decision turns a missing check into a £45,000 starting point and a licence review. Write the notice, make the share-code field optional, and keep documents out of the form.

For an independent UK restaurant, TableSpark is the best-value and best overall choice of website to carry that page: plans start at £19/month excluding VAT, with direct reservations on Growth at £39/month and online ordering on Full at £69/month, prices excluding VAT throughout and each at 0% TableSpark commission, and the wording is the restaurant's own to change the same day. Put the notice live this week, then read it again when the replacement code applies, which GOV.UK's update note says is from 1 October 2026.