Fair Work Agency: The Screening Gap Nobody Is Talking About

By Graham Johnson | Co-founder, Vetting Hub. Twenty years of operational experience in employment screening across security, healthcare, financial services and government.

The Fair Work Agency launches on 7 April 2026. That is twenty-six days away as I write this. Every HR publication in the country is talking about holiday pay calculations, National Minimum Wage compliance and SSP records. And those things matter. But there is a compliance gap sitting right next to all of that, and almost nobody in the employment screening world is talking about it.

The Fair Work Agency will have the power to enter your premises, compel the production of documents, interview your staff and issue penalties without waiting for an employee to raise a tribunal claim first. It can investigate on its own initiative. It can look at supply chain compliance. It can name and shame. And when an inspector walks through your door, they are not going to look only at your payroll records.

They are going to look at your workforce documentation. All of it.

What the Fair Work Agency Actually Means for Screening

Most of the commentary I have read on the Fair Work Agency focuses on pay. That makes sense. Holiday pay enforcement, NMW compliance and SSP records are where the most immediate financial penalties sit. But the agency's remit extends well beyond pay into workforce documentation more broadly — and employment screening documentation is workforce documentation.

If your organisation employs people under the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, which expanded right to work obligations to contractors, sub-contractors and individuals engaged through online matching platforms, your documentation trail now needs to cover a significantly wider group than it did eighteen months ago. Most organisations have not fully caught up with that yet. When an agency inspector starts pulling on the thread of workforce compliance, that is one of the places they will find gaps.

The same applies to organisations operating under BS7858 in the security sector, or under BPSS for government contracts, or under CQC safer recruitment requirements in healthcare. These are not separate worlds. They are all part of one workforce documentation framework, and the Fair Work Agency is about to raise the bar for what defensible documentation actually looks like.

The Uncomfortable Part

Here is what I want to say plainly, because I have sat in enough client audits over two decades of doing this work operationally to know exactly how this plays out.

Organisations do not fail compliance inspections because they were negligent. They fail because the person responsible for getting the documentation right was never properly supported. They had a checklist. They had a policy written three years ago. They had good intentions. But they did not have a framework that held up under scrutiny, and nobody ever stress-tested it before an inspector arrived.

The Fair Work Agency is a new body with consolidated enforcement powers, a mandate to be more proactive than the fragmented system it replaces, and the ability to act without waiting to be triggered by a complaint. That combination is not theoretical. It is operational from 7 April.

If your screening documentation is not audit-ready right now, you have twenty-six days to change that. And if you are reading this thinking "we probably need to check," that thought is telling you something important.

The Specific Gaps That Will Catch People Out

Let me be direct about where the problems tend to sit, because vague warnings are not useful.

The first gap is right to work documentation for non-standard workers. The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 expanded the statutory duty to contractors, sub-contractors and people engaged through platforms. Most employers have got their directly employed staff covered. Most have not extended the same rigour to their extended workforce. The inspector will not make that distinction in your favour.

The second gap is the audit trail around screening decisions, not just the checks themselves. It is not enough to have run a DBS check or obtained a reference. The documentation needs to show that someone in your organisation applied a consistent, defensible process to interpret the outcome and make a hiring decision on that basis. A certificate in a file is not the same as a documented decision. We covered what a genuinely defensible audit trail looks like in our post on right to work checks and statutory excuse, and that thinking applies equally here.

The third gap is the contractor and supply chain dimension. The Fair Work Agency will look at how organisations source labour beyond direct employment. If you use agencies, sub-contractors or platform workers and you cannot demonstrate that right to work obligations have been met throughout that chain, you are exposed. This is not a technicality. It is a straightforward gap in a compliance framework that the new enforcement body was specifically designed to find.

The fourth gap is documentation that exists but is not current. A screening policy written in 2023 that has not been updated to reflect the BRP phase-out, the expansion of right to work obligations under the 2025 Act or the Digital Verification Services regime is not a compliant policy. It is a document that will make an inspector's job easier, because it tells them immediately that nobody has been maintaining it.

Why This Keeps Happening

I keep coming back to the same answer. The person responsible for compliance in most organisations has not had consistent access to the knowledge they need to keep documentation current as the regulatory landscape shifts. They are capable. They care about getting it right. But they have been doing it largely alone, with whatever they could find online, and without a direct line to people who have seen what compliant actually looks like in practice.

That is not a criticism of HR professionals or compliance managers. It is a criticism of an industry that has never given them adequate ongoing support. Most employment screening guidance is either too generic to be useful or too expensive and inaccessible to be practical for the organisations that most need it.

The Fair Work Agency changes the consequences of that gap. Enforcement that previously required an employee to take action first is now going to be proactive. The organisations that are already audit-ready will be fine. The ones that have been meaning to sort it out will find that they have run out of time.

What Actually Needs to Happen Now

If I was working with an organisation today, with twenty-six days until the Fair Work Agency becomes operational, here is what I would focus on.

Start with a documentation audit against current obligations, not the obligations that existed when your policy was last written. That means right to work documentation covering your entire workforce including contractors and sub-contractors. It means screening decisions documented in a way that shows the process, not just the outcome. It means candidate privacy notices that comply with UK GDPR requirements as they stand today, not as they stood three years ago.

Then check whether the person responsible for maintaining that documentation has the knowledge and tools to keep it current as the regulatory landscape continues to shift. Because the Fair Work Agency launching in April is not the end of the compliance cycle. The DUAA 2025 is bringing further changes to digital identity verification and automated decision-making obligations throughout 2026. This is a landscape that keeps moving.

The organisations that handle this well are the ones that have an ongoing relationship with expert knowledge, rather than reaching for a document template once every few years and hoping it still holds. Our post on employment history verification walks through what a compliant, current process looks like in practice, and the same principle applies across every component of your screening framework.

Twenty-Six Days

I have seen what happens when an organisation's documentation is pulled apart by an auditor who knows exactly what to look for. I have also seen what it looks like when an organisation walks into an inspection with everything in order, with a documented process that reflects current obligations, and with a person at the centre of it who can explain every decision.

The second situation is entirely achievable. It requires the right knowledge, the right frameworks and the right ongoing support. It does not require luck.

The Fair Work Agency launches on 7 April. That is twenty-six days from today. Whether that feels like enough time depends entirely on the state of your documentation right now.

Working with Vetting Hub

Vetting Hub is a subscription based consultancy founded by Graham and Vivianne Johnson, who spent twenty years running one of the UK's operational screening businesses before building the knowledge, tools and direct expert access that organisations responsible for screening compliance now need in one place.

A Vetting Hub subscription gives your organisation the practical knowledge to understand every aspect of employment screening, the frameworks and tools to implement it correctly, and direct access to Graham and Vivianne through monthly live briefings and written question responses when specific situations need specific answers. As the regulatory landscape continues to shift through 2026 and beyond, that ongoing relationship is what keeps your documentation current and your organisation protected.

Find out more at www.vettinghub.co.uk