On August 28th, the Home Office announced that the deadline for using digital Right to Work checks, originally introduced as a temporary response because of a lack of face-to-face contact during the pandemic, has been extended until April 2022.
What This Means
Put simply, this means that the Home Office have listened to the views of businesses, who had greatly benefitted from a more streamlined and simple Right to Work checking process through the most difficult of times. The Home Office are clearly satisfied, as are businesses, that the technology that has been used during the pandemic works in terms of efficiency and security.
The length of the extension is also significant. While previous extensions had only been by a month or two, this extension by eight months shows that the Home Office see digital solutions as the future of Right to Work checks, and compliance in general. This news will be of a great relief to many who have had enough to deal with in the last few months, with the ongoing pandemic and the extra complications to recruitment provided by Brexit, without having to worry about acquiring original versions of documents from potential new hires.
A Digital Future
This is a big step in the adoption of technology on a wider scale in compliance. One of the main reasons businesses have not embraced technology for their compliance processes up until now has been a lack of trust in the technology - including concerns over security, efficiency, and having to spend time learning to use a new system when many people already have enough on their plates.
This extension should provide the trust that has been holding people back from using the available technology, and really hit home the cost and time benefits of using technology for the pre-employment compliance process.