GUIDE · RIGHT TO WORK
Right to work checks reach festival crew on 1 October 2026.
Until now, the illegal working regime has mostly been an employment question, and most festival labour is not employment. Section 48 changes that. If you engage casual crew, zero hours staff, individual subcontractors or people found through a platform, the check becomes your problem on 1 October 2026.
THE SHORT ANSWER
From 1 October 2026, section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 extends right to work checks beyond employees to workers engaged under other contracts, individual subcontractors, and people matched through online services. A correct check completed before someone starts work gives you a statutory excuse. Without one, the civil penalty is up to 45,000 pounds per worker for a first breach in three years, and up to 60,000 pounds for a repeat.
NOT LEGAL ADVICE
This is general information about the law as we understand it on the date shown, not legal advice. It is written for people who run events, not for lawyers. Duties turn on facts we do not know about your operation, and the penalties are real, so take advice on your own situation before you rely on any of it.
What actually changes on 1 October
Section 48 amends the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 rather than creating a separate regime. That matters, because it means the machinery you may already know (the check, the statutory excuse, the civil penalty) stays the same. What changes is who it reaches.
The Act extends the prohibition to three things it did not previously cover: people working under a worker's contract rather than a contract of service or apprenticeship, individual subcontractors providing services through an intermediary, and people matched to work through an online service that registers providers and pairs them with clients for a fee.
Read that against a festival crew list. The stage crew booked for four days on a day rate, the rigger who invoices through their own limited company, the steward supplied by an agency, the bar staff found through an app: these are exactly the arrangements the section names.
The statutory excuse is the whole game
A statutory excuse is a complete defence to the civil penalty. You obtain it by carrying out a correct check on the person before they start work, and keeping the evidence. If the person later turns out not to have the right to work, a correct check still protects you.
The corollary is the part people miss. A check done after someone has already worked a shift gives you nothing for that shift. On a build week where crew arrive at different times and some arrive as a favour to somebody else, "before they start work" is an operational problem long before it is a legal one.
- The check happens before the first shift, not before the invoice.
- The evidence has to be retrievable later, by someone who was not there.
- A check on the company that supplied the person is not a check on the person.
What this means at a gate
The legal duty is about the check. The operational duty that follows from it is about identity: the person doing the work has to be the person who was checked.
That sounds obvious until you have run a crew gate. Passes get handed over at shift change. A supplier sends a different rigger than the one on the list because the first one is ill. Someone brings a mate to help load out. None of that is unusual and none of it is malicious, and all of it breaks the link between the check you did and the person on site.
Photo on the credential, and a gate that shows the photo to the person scanning, is the cheapest way to hold that link. It is not a legal requirement. It is just the thing that makes the record you are keeping mean something.
Subcontract chains, carefully
Section 48 does reach into supply chains. It can treat a person who contracts to provide or arrange services as the employer of the worker who actually performs the work, and it can do so where there is no direct contract between them.
What we are not going to tell you is exactly how far that runs in your particular chain, because it turns on the arrangements, and because the detailed Home Office guidance and code of practice for the new categories were still awaited when this page was written. Anyone telling you confidently where the line falls in a four-tier contracting structure is guessing.
The practical response is not legal. It is to know, per person on site, who engaged them and who holds the check. If you cannot answer that from your accreditation records today, the chain question is academic: you will not be able to evidence anything either way.
What we would do between now and October
Nothing here needs software, and none of it needs us. It needs a list.
- Write down every category of person who comes on site and how each is engaged: employed, agency, individual subcontractor, company subcontractor, volunteer, platform.
- For each category, name who currently does the check, if anyone does.
- Find the categories where the answer is nobody. Those are the ones 1 October changes.
- Decide where the evidence will live, and make sure it is somewhere a person who was not on site can find it a year later.
- Take advice on the chain question for the arrangements you actually use, before October rather than after an audit.
Where Bloop fits, and where it does not
Bloop is an accreditation system. It holds the record of who was engaged, by whom, with what documents, approved by which named person, and it holds the scan log of when they were on site. That is the evidence layer, and it is genuinely useful when somebody asks you to account for a person eleven months later.
Right to work checking itself is not built. We are not going to describe it as though it is. It is the compliance layer, sold as available from 1 October 2026 and not before, and the identity provider behind it is not chosen yet, so we do not name one.
Bloop does not make anyone comply with anything. You comply. Bloop is where the evidence lives.
Written from running accreditation on live events, and generalised so it is useful whatever you run it on. Last reviewed: 24 August 2026.
WHERE THIS CAME FROM
Primary sources, read on the dates shown. Legislation and the regulator rather than somebody's summary of them, so you can check any statement on this page yourself.
- Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, section 48READ 24 AUGUST 2026
- Commencement No. 4 Regulations 2026 (SI 2026/683)READ 24 AUGUST 2026
- Home Office employer's guide to right to work checksREAD 24 AUGUST 2026
QUESTIONS THIS PAGE GETS ASKED
Does this apply to volunteers?
It depends on whether the arrangement is genuinely voluntary or is work by another name, and that turns on the facts rather than on the label. A volunteer who receives only expenses is a different case from one on a day rate called a stipend. This is a good example of a question to put to an adviser about your own arrangements rather than resolve from a web page.
We use an agency. Is it not their problem?
The agency has its own duties, and section 48 also reaches people who contract to provide or arrange services. Both can be true at once. The safe operational position is to know who holds the check for every person on your site rather than to assume it is somebody else.
What is the penalty, exactly?
The civil penalty for illegal working is up to 45,000 pounds per worker for a first breach within a three year period, and up to 60,000 pounds per worker for a second or subsequent breach. Those figures have applied since February 2024. A first penalty may attract a reduction for prompt payment, and the Home Office can issue a warning notice instead of a penalty in some first-breach cases.
Do we have to re-check people every season?
A correct initial check covers the engagement it was done for. Follow-up checks are required where someone has time-limited permission to work. For festival crew who come back each year on a fresh engagement, the practical question is whether your record from last season is still evidence, and whether the person in front of you is the person in it.
Is a photo of a passport enough?
The prescribed methods and the documents that satisfy them are set out in the Home Office employer guidance, and they change. Do not take a process from a blog post, including this one. Take it from the guidance linked below, on the day you set the process up.