What is the EU Settlement scheme?
If you are an EU citizen and want to stay in the UK beyond 30 June 2021, you/your family members will need to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme for the right to work. The EU Settlement Scheme allows you to continue to live, work and study here in the UK.
It means you continue to be eligible for:
- public services, such as healthcare and schools
- public funds and pensions
- British citizenship, if you want to apply and meet the requirements.
Find government guidance on the EU Employees right to work here.
The scheme falls into two clear divisions; the first is the settled status. If you have an applicant that has resided in the UK for a continuous period of more than five years, they have indefinitely to remain. What should happen? Your EU nationals that work for you, should take their own responsibility to apply for settled status. Once applied and confirmed, your EU national staff will continue to work seamlessly until they leave or retire.
Pre-settled status is for EU nationals who have been in the UK for up to 5 years, when they apply for pre-settled status they can continue to work as normal in your business with that qualification and when they get five years they will receive the indefinite status to remain.
Reminder: It is your staffs responsibility to manage their own applications, it is indirect discrimination if you specifically ask them to do it. You can approach this issue by explaining and raising awareness of the issue to all your staff, advising them to find out if it is relevant to them and if so to have it in place by 30th June 2021.
From July 1st 2021
EEA citizens and their family members can no longer rely on their EEA passport or national identity card to prove their right to work in the UK. Instead they must prove their immigration status in the same way as all other foreign nationals.
As an employer, you will need your EEA workers (hired after 1 July 2021), granted a status under EUSS, to provide a share code, so you can carry out a Right to Work check.
Your EEA workers who are ineligible under EUSS must show you an alternative form of immigration status, such as a Skilled Worker visa, to demonstrate their Right to Work status.
Irish citizens continue to have unrestricted access to work in the UK, and their Irish passports, Irish passport card or Irish birth or adoption certification (along with an official document to show their National Insurance number) remain sufficient to prove their right to Work status.
How does Bizimply help with the Settlement Status scheme?
With Bizimply, one of the many features allows you as the employer to record the immigration/work status of overseas employees so you can stay compliant and keep a record.
This can be done using the Custom Field in the Personal tab of the employee profile.
1. Set up Custom Field in Employee Settings, adding the title as ‘Settled Status’ with dropdown options ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.
2. This field will now appear in all employee’s ‘Personal’ tab which is only visible to roles with the permission to see this tab.
3. To report on employees’ settled status, run the Employee Export report which will now report on that new field that was added. A simple filter can be applied to this report to report the status of employees.
