What is the Fair Work Agency?

A single labour market enforcement body created under the Employment Rights Act 2025, consolidating work that previously sat with the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate, the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority and HMRC's national minimum wage enforcement.

Does the Fair Work Agency change what agencies must comply with?

The underlying obligations are largely the same. What changes is that one body sees all of them together, so a gap that used to be visible to one regulator is now visible from several angles at once.

What should an agency do to prepare?

Hold the evidence in a form that answers questions crossing the old boundaries: a placement's Key Information Document, right-to-work check, umbrella due diligence and pay records together, rather than in separate systems that cannot be joined.

The Fair Work Agency and what it means for agencies

What is being consolidated

Labour market enforcement has historically been divided. The Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate covered the Conduct Regulations and how agencies treat work-seekers. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority covered licensing and exploitation in specific sectors. HMRC enforced the national minimum wage. Each held a slice of the picture.

The Fair Work Agency brings that work under one body. For an agency, this is less a new rulebook than a new vantage point.

Why one inspector is harder than three

Split enforcement had a quiet consequence: a question could usually only be asked from one side. A minimum wage query did not naturally reach into whether a Key Information Document was issued. A Conduct Regulations question did not naturally reach into what the umbrella in the chain was doing with payroll.

Consolidation removes that shelter. The questions that were previously hard to ask are the ones that cross the old boundaries: was this worker told what they would be paid before they agreed, did the money that reached them match it, and was the company that paid them one you had checked. Those are one question to a single body.

What that asks of an agency

Nothing on the list below is new law. What is new is that they now have to be answerable together, about the same worker, on the same day.

What the worker was told. The Key Information Document issued before terms were agreed, and what it said at the time rather than what the template says now.
What they were actually paid. The chain from approved hours to the invoice to the payment, without a gap where a spreadsheet used to be.
Who paid them. The umbrella in the chain, and the due diligence held on it while the placement was running.
Whether they could work at all. The right-to-work check, its route, and its date.

An agency that holds these in four systems can produce four answers. It cannot easily produce the one answer that joins them, which is the answer being asked for.

The solution

BookKept keeps the whole chain against one placement

The Key Information Document, the right-to-work check, the umbrella evidence, the approved weeks and both invoices all hang off the same placement record, and every compliance-relevant act writes a hash-chained audit row that is never edited or deleted. One click assembles the full chain for a placement as an evidence pack. The join an inspector asks for is the product's spine rather than an export somebody builds the night before.

See what it does

More guides

The full 2026 to 2027 compliance timeline Key Information Documents Right-to-work checks from 1 October 2026