What happens in a Home Office compliance visit

Announced or not

A compliance officer may visit before a licence is granted, or at any point afterwards. Pre-licence visits are usually arranged. Post-licence visits increasingly are not.

The practical consequence is that your records have to be in a state where somebody other than the person who built the filing system can produce them, today.

What is actually examined

Whether your systems and procedures genuinely operate the way your application said they do. That means the records themselves, but also how they got there: who is responsible, what happens when someone starts, what happens when a document is about to expire.

Officers commonly speak to workers and to the people named on your licence. A process that only exists in one person’s head does not survive that conversation.

What is most often missing

• Right to work evidence that is out of date, or that does not show when the check was made
• A contract or pay arrangement that does not match what was stated when the worker was sponsored
• Recruitment files without the advert, the applicant numbers, or any note of why the successful candidate was chosen
• No history of contact details — just the current address
• Absences that were managed informally and never recorded

What to have ready

For any worker an officer picks at random: the right to work evidence and its date, the contract, the payslips and proof of payment, the recruitment file, the contact history, and the absence record. Being able to produce that for one worker in a few minutes is a reasonable test of whether you could do it for all of them.