Still Got BRPs on File? Your Statutory Excuse May Already Be Gone.

If you still have employees on file whose right to work was confirmed using a physical Biometric Residence Permit, and you have not since completed an online check using their share code, you may have already lost your statutory excuse on those hires.

That is not a warning about something that might happen. It has already happened.

Physical BRPs were removed from the list of acceptable documents for manual right to work checks as of April 2022. The cards themselves ceased to be issued entirely from October 2024. And the Home Office guidance, updated in June 2025 and still current, is unambiguous: a manual check of an original, expired BRP does not establish a statutory excuse. If an enforcement officer reviewed your files today, the question would not be whether your employees have the right to work in the UK. It would be whether your documentation gives you a legal defence. For anyone whose record shows a BRP check that was never followed up with an online eVisa verification, the answer may well be no.

How the transition happened and why so many employers are still exposed

The move to eVisas has been underway since 2022, but it was staggered in a way that made it straightforward for HR teams to miss the critical action points along the way.

BRPs issued in previous years carried expiry dates of 31st December 2024, even where the holder's actual immigration permission extended well beyond that date. The reason was administrative: the Home Office was preparing to decommission physical cards ahead of a fully digital system. Many employers interpreted that card expiry date as the trigger for action and did nothing in the meantime.

The real deadline was earlier for many. For any employee whose right to work was checked using their physical BRP before 6th April 2022, an online follow-up check was required before the card's expiry date to retain the statutory excuse. If that follow-up check was not done, the statutory excuse ended when the card expired, not when the employee's actual leave expires. The employee may have every legal right to work in the UK. Your documentation may not support that position.

What the current rules actually say

The Home Office is clear. From January 2026, non-British and non-Irish workers can no longer prove their right to work using a physical BRP card under any circumstances. The card is no longer on the list of acceptable documents for any new or repeat check. The only compliant route for the vast majority of non-UK nationals is the online right to work checking service, using a share code generated from the worker's UKVI account.

The process is straightforward. The worker logs into their UKVI account, generates a nine-character share code, and provides it to you along with their date of birth. You enter both into the Home Office online service at gov.uk/view-right-to-work. The service returns a real-time confirmation of their current status, the conditions of their permission, and the expiry date where applicable. You save a copy of that result page, record the date of the check, and store it securely for the duration of employment and for two years afterwards. That is what a compliant check looks like in 2026.

What it does not look like is a photocopy of a plastic card in a personnel file.

The gap that most organisations have not yet addressed

The employees most at risk of being undocumented in your files are not new starters. They are people who joined your organisation before April 2022, had their right to work confirmed manually using a physical BRP at the time, and whose records have not been revisited since.

For those employees, the statutory excuse your organisation holds ended at the point the BRP expired. In most cases that was 31st December 2024. The employee's leave may be perfectly valid. Their UKVI account may be fully set up and their eVisa accessible. But if you have not completed an online check using their share code, and you do not have a copy of that online result page on file, you do not have a defensible record.

This is the gap that tends to surface during audits and enforcement visits rather than routine HR reviews, because nobody flagged it as a task to complete. It did not appear as an expiry alert in an HR system. It was not a renewal. It was a method change, and method changes rarely generate automatic reminders.

We wrote about the broader right to work compliance picture in our post on right to work checks and employer compliance in 2026, and the civil penalty landscape is covered in detail in our piece on the £60,000 civil penalty myth that puts careful employers at risk. Both are worth reading alongside this one.

What you need to do now

The action here is not complicated but it does need to happen without delay.

First, identify every employee in your organisation whose right to work was originally checked using a physical BRP or Biometric Residence Card. Your HR records should tell you which method was used and on what date. If that check pre-dates April 2022 and no subsequent online check is recorded, that employee's file needs attention.

Second, ask those employees to generate a share code from their UKVI account and provide it to you. Most will already have a UKVI account set up. If any have not yet created one, direct them to gov.uk/get-access-evisa. The process is free and straightforward.

Third, complete the online check using the share code at gov.uk/view-right-to-work. Save the result page with the date of the check clearly recorded. That document is your statutory excuse going forward.

Fourth, build a repeat check schedule for anyone with time-limited leave. Your statutory excuse on a time-limited worker lasts only until the expiry date shown on their online check result. You need a system that flags repeat checks before those dates arrive, not after.

If you have employees whose BRP check was done between April 2022 and the end of 2024, the picture is slightly different. For most workers hired or rechecked after April 2022, the online checking system was already mandatory, which means an online check should already be on file. If it is not, that is a gap that needs addressing regardless of what physical documents may have been seen at the time.

Why the enforcement environment makes this urgent

This is not a theoretical compliance issue. Illegal working enforcement has reached the highest recorded levels in UK history. Between July 2024 and December 2025, raids increased by 77% and arrests by 83% according to Home Office data confirmed in January 2026. The civil penalties for employing someone without a statutory excuse now reach £45,000 per worker for a first breach and £60,000 per worker for repeat breaches. And the penalty applies whether the employer intended to break the rules or simply failed to maintain compliant documentation.

The Fair Work Agency, which launches on 7th April 2026 and which we covered in our post on what the Fair Work Agency means for your screening documentation, adds another layer of scrutiny to employment records. The direction of travel is clear. Enforcement is increasing. The definition of a compliant record is tightening. Organisations that have not updated their right to work documentation to reflect the eVisa system are carrying a risk that is entirely avoidable.

The practical question to ask yourself this week

Go into your HR records and pull the files for any non-British, non-Irish employees hired before April 2022. Look at how their right to work was originally verified. If you see a photocopy of a BRP card and nothing else, that is the file that needs an online check completing before anything else happens.

It will take the employee a few minutes to generate a share code. It will take you a few minutes to run the check and save the result. The statutory excuse that action creates is worth considerably more than the time it takes.

Working with Vetting Hub

Vetting Hub is a subscription based compliance consultancy and specialist training platform founded by Graham and Vivianne Johnson, who spent twenty years running an operational screening business before building the resource they wished had existed when they were doing this work themselves.

Through The Hub, subscribers receive CPD certified practical training built from real case experience, a full library of compliance templates, frameworks and decision guides, and direct access to Graham and Vivianne for the specific questions that do not have simple answers. Whether you are auditing your current right to work documentation, preparing for a Fair Work Agency inspection, or simply trying to build a process that holds up under scrutiny, The Hub gives you the knowledge and the tools to do that with confidence.

Subscription options start from £397 per month for organisations with up to 25 staff. Find out more at www.vettinghub.co.uk