8
Chippie owner given ‘devastating’ £40,000 fine by Home office for allegedly illegal hire
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
8 points (100.0% liked)
United Kingdom
5274 readers
217 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Shouldn't they fine the illegal in that case? It sounds like the business took appropriate measures.
Granted, you can check if a passport is authentic using your phone (as passports have RFID chips which contain digitally signed data that your phone can read) but I wouldn't expect an old bloke to know how to do that
There is the point where if the person had valid identification, and National Insurance, and was paid via HMRC, that the onus should be on notifying the business of a change of status. Whether that's the student or HMRC I don't know. They would notify the business on a change of required tax.
Yeah, I feel HMRC should have done something other than wait two years before going "actually no, pay us a fine".
That's why businesses insist on seeing your actual passport. Not a picture of it.
I can give you a picture of anything, that's been true for years even before the rise of image generation AI. I once had to mail my passport via recorded courier to a company in London in order to apply for a job in Leeds. Hell of a pain but necessary.
I had a job and they only wanted a picture scan of it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mailing it sounds super annoying. Thankfully I have multiple.
I think HMRC should probably make an official app for scanning passports and verifying right to work. It is definitely possible. Also would help with a visa (since you could probably fake a visa easier than faking a passport. Although I think biometric residence permits are scannable. But the physical cards were phased out unfortunately.)
Yeah this was for a pretty secure job where you had to be a citizen in order to be eligible, so they would been a bit oversensitive with the passport, but really every business should see the physical passport because I could send them anything.
It's easy enough to fake a picture of a passport but much harder to fake the actual passport. If someone's coming into the business on their first day just have them bring the passport with them on that day. The only reason I had to mail my passport was because I was going to work in a remote office.