New right to work rules are placing hospitality staffing models under fresh legal scrutiny, according to law firm Freeths, which warns that hotels, restaurants and bars face heightened compliance obligations when checking workers' eligibility to work in the UK.

For an industry that runs on high churn, agency labour and seasonal hiring, the changes strike at the operational core: every hire now carries a documentation risk that operators — not recruiters — may ultimately answer for.

Why do the new rules matter for operators?

Right-to-work checks are a legal precondition for employing anyone in the UK. Employers who fail to conduct them correctly, or who retain staff whose permission to work has lapsed, can face civil penalties and, in serious cases, criminal liability.

Freeths' analysis points to hospitality's staffing architecture as the sector most exposed. The typical model combines:

• High employee turnover, with repeated onboarding cycles each month
• Heavy reliance on agency and temporary workers, where responsibility for checks can be unclear
• Seasonal peaks that compress recruitment timelines
• Multi-site operations, where head-office visibility of frontline hiring practice varies

Each of these characteristics multiplies the number of checks an operator must perform — and the number of opportunities for error.

Who carries the compliance burden?

The legal duty to verify right to work sits with the employer. Where staffing agencies supply workers, operators cannot simply assume the agency has done the work. Freeths flags this split as a recurring point of failure: contracts with agencies need to state explicitly who performs checks, what evidence is retained, and who bears the penalty if a worker turns out to be ineligible.

For franchised and multi-site groups, the question extends to brand standards. A company-operated site can enforce a central HR process directly; a franchised unit may follow its own hiring practice, leaving the brand to decide how much oversight it wants — and how much liability it will accept.

What should hospitality employers do now?

Freeths' guidance points operators toward a practical audit of their hiring pipeline rather than a one-off fix. Core steps include:

• Verify that every current employee has a valid, correctly documented right-to-work check on file
• Confirm that repeat checks are diarised for workers with time-limited permission, since eligibility can expire mid-employment
• Review agency contracts to allocate check responsibilities and penalty risk in writing
• Train site-level managers, who often conduct onboarding personally, on correct check procedure and record retention
• Apply a consistent process across all sites, company-operated and franchised alike, to avoid gaps in audit trails

Records matter as much as checks. An employer that performed a check correctly but cannot produce the evidence may still struggle to establish a statutory excuse against penalties.

What is at stake for the sector?

Hospitality already carries some of the tightest labour economics of any consumer industry, with wage costs forming one of the largest lines on the P&L. Compliance failures add a further layer of exposure: penalties per illegal worker, disruption when staff must be removed mid-roster, and management time diverted to remediation during peak trading periods.

The broader pressure is structural. Persistent recruitment difficulty has pushed many operators toward more flexible staffing arrangements — exactly the arrangements where right-to-work obligations are easiest to miss. The new rules effectively raise the compliance cost of that flexibility.

Operators that treat right-to-work verification as a standing part of workforce governance — embedded in HR systems, agency contracts and site checklists — will absorb the change with minimal friction. Those that leave it to ad-hoc practice at unit level face the sharper edge of the new regime, and Freeths expects enforcement attention to follow where staffing models concentrate risk.