A new enforcement body called the Fair Work Agency became operational alongside the April 2026 changes, and most employers we talk to have never heard of it. That's going to change fast, because it consolidates enforcement of the minimum wage, holiday pay, statutory sick pay and other basic worker protections into a single body with proper investigatory powers.
Until now, an SME's realistic risk of a proactive compliance check was low. HMRC enforced the minimum wage, Acas dealt with disputes informally, and most employers only encountered scrutiny after an employee complained. The Fair Work Agency changes that calculation. It's built to be a single point of enforcement across several overlapping areas of law, which means the person turning up to ask questions about your holiday pay could be the same person who ends up looking at your payslips and your right-to-work checks in the same visit.
The employers most exposed are the ones who have never been asked to prove compliance and therefore have never built the habit of keeping the evidence. If someone asked you tomorrow to show six months of accurate holiday accrual records, correctly calculated minimum wage payments for every hour worked including travel time and training, and evidence that your SSP calculations reflect the new rules, could you produce it in an afternoon?
A few home truths from where we sit advising SMEs day to day. Rounding hours down instead of up on timesheets is a minimum wage risk, not an accounting quirk. Unpaid trial shifts are a common enforcement target. Holiday pay that doesn't include regular overtime or commission is usually wrong. None of these are exotic problems. They're the ordinary, boring compliance gaps that a proactive enforcement visit is specifically designed to find.
This isn't a reason to panic. It's a reason to get your paperwork in order before someone else finds the gap for you. Employers who can produce clean, consistent records tend to have short, uneventful conversations with regulators. Employers who can't tend to have long ones.
If you'd like a compliance health check before the Fair Work Agency finds you first, get in touch with Neathouse Partners on 0333 041 1094 or through neathousepartners.com.
For further reading check out National Minimum Wage & Compliance
