On 7 April 2026, the UK’s employment compliance landscape quietly shifts. The Fair Work Agency (FWA) brings together the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate, the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority and HMRC’s National Minimum and Living Wage team under a single enforcement body. And it’s one with significantly expanded powers and a remit to act proactively, not just in response to complaints.
For the first time, holiday pay falls under state enforcement. Inspectors can enter workplaces, demand records and bring employment tribunal claims directly, even where workers haven’t raised a grievance themselves. Civil penalties for non-compliance can reach 200% of unpaid amounts, repayable within 28 days.
None of this will feel dramatic in a well-run organisation. But it will expose the quiet vulnerabilities that have always existed in time and attendance management, and that many businesses have never had cause to address.
Where The Risk Actually Sits
The FWA’s enforcement priorities reveal exactly where organisations are most exposed. Each one traces back to the same fundamental question: can you prove, with precision, what hours your people actually worked?
- Holiday Pay
For workers with variable hours, shifts or overtime, statutory holiday pay must reflect actual earnings, not contracted minimums. Without accurate time records, calculation becomes guesswork and guesswork becomes liability. - National Minimum and Living Wage
The FWA will scrutinise whether effective hourly rates – accounting for unpaid time, deductions and travel – meet legal minimums. Contracted hours are not enough. Actual hours must be demonstrable. - Guaranteed Hours Obligations
New rules require employers to make a Guaranteed Hours Offer to zero-hours and low-hours workers once actual hours consistently exceed contracted minimums. Tracking reference periods requires systematic, reliable data. - Workplace Inspections
Inspectors have the right to enter premises and require employers to produce evidence of compliance. Timeclock records are a primary form of that evidence, and their absence is itself a finding. - Statutory Sick Pay
The FWA gains new powers to enforce SSP compliance, adding another layer of requirement for organisations to maintain complete and accurate attendance records over time.
The Problem With Paper
For organisations still relying on manual timesheets, spreadsheets or badge-swipe systems with limited audit trails, the FWA creates a genuine step-change in risk. Not because the rules on pay have fundamentally changed, many of these obligations existed before, but because the consequences of poor record-keeping are now more visible, more enforceable and more expensive.
The challenge isn’t malicious, it’s often structural. A manager who rounds clocking times. A shift that started early because of a handover. Overtime that was worked and paid, but never formally logged. None of these are intended to cheat anyone, but in an FWA inspection, intent matters far less than evidence.
Manual processes create gaps. Gaps create risk. The FWA’s proactive enforcement model means that the absence of clear records is, in itself, a problem – one that doesn’t wait for a worker to make a complaint before it becomes an issue for the employer.
What Good Looks Like
The organisations best positioned for the new enforcement environment aren’t necessarily the ones with the largest HR teams or the most complex workforce management software. They’re the ones with accurate, auditable, real-time records of who worked, when and for how long.
Modern time and attendance terminals handle this almost invisibly. A biometric clocking event (typically fingerprint or facial recognition) creates an immutable, timestamped record that can’t be adjusted after the fact and doesn’t rely on anyone remembering to fill in a form. For organisations with shift-based, variable-hours or zero-hours workers, this kind of precision isn’t a luxury. Under the FWA, it’s protection.
Equally important is what happens to that data once it’s captured. Records that sit in isolation on a terminal are useful; records that flow in real time into your wider HCM platform, updating payroll calculations, flagging anomalies, feeding holiday pay reports, are transformative. The difference between compliance as a periodic exercise and compliance as a continuous state.
Built For Exactly This Moment
Grosvenor’s GT4, GT8 and GT10 timeclocks capture time and attendance data with precision, while GTConnect, our cloud management platform, delivers real-time visibility and seamless HCM integration. Accurate records, automatically. The kind of audit trail the Fair Work Agency will expect to see.