Why Digital Immigration Status Matters in Recruitment

Since April 2022, EU nationals who were granted pre-settled or settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme can only prove their right to work in the UK using a digital share code — there is no physical document equivalent. An agency recruiter who asks an EU national to produce a passport as their right-to-work evidence is not conducting a compliant check: they are collecting irrelevant documentation while missing the actual verification requirement. UKVI guidance is explicit that a passport alone is not sufficient for EU nationals without settled status who arrived after 31 December 2020, and carrying out a check in the wrong format provides no statutory excuse if the worker does not have the right to work.

The civil penalty for employing a worker without the right to work in the UK is currently up to £60,000 per illegal worker under 2024 provisions. For staffing agencies supplying high volumes of workers — particularly in sectors like food processing, logistics, and hospitality that employ significant numbers of EU nationals — an incorrect right-to-work checking process is not a theoretical risk. It is a recurring operational exposure that may only be discovered during a UKVI audit, by which time the liability has already accumulated.

For agency compliance teams, digital immigration status has also introduced a new category of process error: workers who have started the EUSS application or whose status has expired during the biannual re-check cycle. Managing this requires system-level tracking, not manual file review.

How Digital Immigration Status Works

Digital immigration status in the UK context refers to the online-only record of an individual's immigration permission held by UKVI. Unlike the older Biometric Residence Permit (BRP) or a physical visa vignette, digital status has no physical counterpart. It is checked via the UKVI View and Prove service at https://www.gov.uk/view-prove-immigration-status, where the individual generates a share code that the employer or agency uses to verify their status through the Employer Checking Service.

The share code is valid for 90 days and returns a standardised response confirming whether the individual has the right to work, the basis of that right (settled status, pre-settled status, a specific visa route), and any time limitation on the permission. The agency's compliance record must include a copy of the confirmation received, the date of the check, and the share code used. This documentation is the equivalent of the copy of a physical document that is retained for manual right-to-work checks.

For EU nationals with pre-settled status — the most common category still subject to active management — the status is time-limited and must be extended before it expires. Agencies that placed EU workers in 2021 and 2022 under pre-settled status are now in a period where those workers' status may be expiring or may have already been converted to settled status. Without a proactive re-verification process built into the CRM, a worker who fails to renew their pre-settled status before expiry continues working without a right to do so, and the agency only discovers this when they run their next compliance audit — or when UKVI does.

The broader category of digital-only status also includes eVisas issued to non-EU nationals whose BRPs are being phased out. From late 2024, UKVI began transitioning all physical documents to the eVisa system, meaning the share code verification process is becoming standard across all immigration routes, not just EU nationals.

Digital Immigration Status in Practice

A compliance officer at a commercial staffing agency manages a workforce of 1,800 active temporary workers, approximately 35% of whom are EU nationals with EUSS status. Following the introduction of the eVisa rollout, she audits the agency's right-to-work file records and identifies 94 workers whose checks were completed using passport-only documentation after the April 2022 cut-off — invalid checks that provide no statutory excuse. She initiates a re-verification process for all 94, contacting workers to request share codes and documenting the corrected checks. For 11 workers whose pre-settled status has since lapsed without renewal, she suspends their assignments and provides UKVI guidance on the status renewal process, resuming their placements only on confirmed valid status. The agency updates its onboarding workflow to require share code verification for all EU nationals, regardless of the document they present.