Home Office enforcement is at record levels, and the sectors many of the Asian community's businesses work in are squarely in the frame. Yash Dubal, CEO of AY&J Solicitors, on how to protect what you have built.
Ask any restaurateur, shop owner or care operator what keeps them up at night, and a few years ago immigration enforcement would not have made the list. Today it should. In the first six months of 2026 alone, the Home Office carried out 7,270 illegal-working visits and issued more than 74 million pounds in fines to over 1,200 businesses. Visits were up nearly a third on the year before, and restaurants, takeaways and cafes drew the most attention of any sector.
For the British Asian business community, this is not an abstract policy story. The trades that enforcement focuses on, hospitality, retail, care, beauty and food, are the very sectors in which many of our family firms have built their livelihoods over decades. When the Home Office talks about tougher enforcement, it is, in large part, talking about businesses like ours.
The cost of getting it wrong
The penalties are severe and rising. An employer found to have someone working without the right to do so can be fined up to 45,000 pounds per worker for a first breach, and 60,000 pounds for a repeat one. For a small business, a single wrong hire can mean a fine larger than a year's profit.
The way problems come to light has changed too. The Home Office no longer relies only on the officer at the door. It now cross-references payroll data held by HMRC against its own records, so a discrepancy can surface quietly, in a letter, long before anyone visits. Enforcement has become data-led, and the old assumption that a small, well-run family business will fly under the radar no longer holds.
The check that protects you
The reassuring part is that the law gives every employer a clear defence, and it is not complicated. A correct right-to-work check, carried out before someone starts and kept on file, gives you what is called a statutory excuse. Get it right, and even if a worker later turns out to have no right to work, you are protected from the penalty.
The catch is that the checks have moved online. Share codes and digital verification have replaced the old photocopied passport, and a check done the wrong way, or a day too late, offers no protection at all. Most penalties are not handed to bad employers who knew what they were doing. In the right-to-work and illegal-working cases AY&J Solicitors advises on, that is almost always the story: a good business, one missed check, discovered too late. The firm has set out how the right-to-work checks now work for employers, and it is worth ten minutes of any owner's time.
If you sponsor workers, the stakes are higher still
Many of our community's businesses have gone a step further and taken a sponsor licence to bring in chefs, carers and specialists from abroad. That licence is valuable, but it carries duties that continue for as long as you hold it: keeping records, reporting changes on time, and running those same right-to-work checks. If illegal working is found where you hold a licence, the licence itself can be suspended or revoked, and every sponsored worker you employ can lose their permission overnight. The fine is painful; losing the ability to hire the staff your business runs on can be fatal.
“The cases we are brought into are rarely dishonest employers,” says Yash Dubal, CEO of AY&J Solicitors. “They are hard-working owners who missed one step during a busy week, and then faced a penalty or a licence problem that put everything at risk. Almost all of it is preventable with the right checks and a little planning.”
What to do this week
You do not need a compliance department. You need a habit. Ask yourself:
• Do we run an online right-to-work check on every new hire, before their first shift, and keep the evidence?
• Do we know when any worker's permission expires, and have we diarised the follow-up check?
• If we hold a sponsor licence, is one named person responsible for reporting changes on time?
• Could we produce our records tomorrow if the Home Office asked?
If any of those makes you hesitate, you are carrying more risk than you need to.
The British Asian business story is one of building something to pass on. Protecting it now means treating immigration compliance not as red tape, but as part of running the business, as normal as the accounts or the fire certificate. If you are unsure where you stand, AY&J Solicitors, an SRA regulated, Legal 500 ranked UK immigration firm, helps business owners get their right-to-work and sponsor-licence compliance in order before a problem arises. You can find guidance and speak to the team here.
This article is paid content. It has been reviewed and edited by the Eastern Eye editorial team to meet our content standards.
