4 responses

1. Given the UKBA’s inability sometimes to confirm an applicant’s immigration status, this may make private landlords as paranoid as Employers and create more homeless unemployable people.

   1. “The online ‘right to work’ checking service helps employers perform fast and effective ‘right to work’ checks on an employee’s biometric residence permit. This is a free, introductory service for employers until we launch a fully automated service, operated by our commercial partners. When you use that service, our partners will charge you a fee for each check.” It’s clearly another taxation…

2. I doubt that it would be easy to manage / enforce, the few landlords who might be prosecuted for non compliance would have exit routes such as not being experts in examining status documents and inadequate provision from the authorities to answer queries related.

   That said the practical effect will be that anyone who appears ‘foreign’ will have greater difficulty accessing private lets, be they legal or illegal, like street operations at tube stations, it will glean results (more illegals will be encountered and arrested), but it is a sledgehammer approach and strikes me as back of a fag packet policy.

   1. Couldn’t agree more – except if it works in the same way as for employers it is a ‘strict liability’ civil penalty where there is no way out if the documents were not retained by the landlord for later inspection. Recipe for chaos and discrimination. At least employers have some notions of equal treatment and equality laws, but landlords do not.