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Guide · regulation 13A

Key Information Documents: what agencies must issue

Since 2020, an employment business must give a work-seeker a Key Information Document before terms are agreed. This guide covers who owes one, what it must show, where agencies actually fail on it, and how to make the document a by-product of the record instead of a chore.

The obligation

Regulation 13A of the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 reg 13A requires an employment business to give each agency work-seeker a Key Information Document before terms are agreed. The point of it is transparency about pay: who employs the worker, what chain the money travels through, and what deductions stand between the rate and their pocket.

The timing is the sharp edge. A perfectly drafted KID issued a week after the worker started fails the regulation; the document exists to inform the decision to sign, not to decorate the file afterwards.

What it must show

Where agencies actually fail: not the wording, the operations. The KID lives in a template folder, someone forgets it on the fifth placement in a busy week, and nothing in the system knows it is missing. Enforcement by the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate starts with exactly that gap.

Documents should fall out of records

Everything a KID states is already a fact the back office holds: the placement’s engagement type, the umbrella if there is one, the rate, the chain. Generating the document from those facts means it cannot drift from reality, the issuing act is stamped against the placement, and a placement without one is visible instead of silent.

The solution

BookKept generates the KID from the placement itself

One click on a placement produces its Key Information Document from the record’s own facts, stamps the issue against the placement, files the document with a retention category, and puts it on the worker’s own portal page. A placement missing its KID says so on the compliance screen, and the reg 21 assignment confirmation rides the same machinery.

See what it does