Two unannounced visits, a New Year's Eve suspension letter, and twenty working days

The Home Office inspectors arrived twice in October without warning. The suspension letter was dated 31 December. It described the failures as serious and systemic, and gave the bakery group until the end of January to respond or lose the licence.

At a glance

• Client: Multi-site bakery and food retail group
• Sponsored workers: Eight
• Trigger: Two unannounced Home Office compliance visits, October 2025
• Suspended: 31 December 2025, with immediate effect
• Deadline: 29 January 2026, twenty working days to respond or face revocation

How they found us

They contacted us through our website on 2 January 2026, two days after the suspension letter. After two video calls, they instructed us 21 days later.

The challenge

• Two unannounced compliance visits in October 2025, followed by a suspension letter dated 31 December characterising the breaches as serious and systemic.
• Underpayment of several sponsored workers below their stated salary, identified from tax records, with the shortfalls unreported.
• Multiple reporting failures outside the ten-day window: delayed start dates, employment endings, grants of settlement, refusals of leave and transfers between related entities.
• Many of the outstanding reports were only made on the day of the compliance visit, which the Home Office viewed badly.
• Right to work checks not completed before employment started, and online checks completed late.

What we did

• Rejected the defensive approach. Our advice was explicit: representations that minimised the failures would lose. The strategy was acknowledgement of the breaches plus a credible remediation plan.
• Explained the underlying cause properly. The underpayments arose from statutory sick pay, with the company unaware that salary reductions still have to be reported. That is an explanation, not an excuse, and it had to be framed as one.
• Assembled the evidence the Home Office would want. Organisational hierarchy chart, tax records, three months of payslips, and evidence of salary payments into workers' personal accounts.
• Worked around the client's availability. The director was unavailable, so the fact-finding ran with the head of HR rather than waiting.

Why it matters

Statutory sick pay reduces someone's salary. That reduction is reportable. Almost no small employer knows this, and it is the kind of detail that turns a compliant business into a non-compliant one without anybody doing anything wrong. Systemic, in the Home Office's language, often just means repeated.