On 18 September the Musicians' Union warned its members about a change most of them had never heard of. From 1 October, a musician who arranges a substitute for a gig could find themselves carrying Right to Work duties normally reserved for employers: checking documents, keeping copies, and answering to the Home Office if the paperwork is missing. The MU was clear that this could apply even where the players involved have worked together for years. It is seeking urgent legal clarification and pressing the Home Office for either a clear answer or an exemption.

That leaves function and theatre freelancers with days rather than weeks and an unanswered question. This piece sets out what the law changes, where the deputy system sits inside it, what is still unresolved, and a checklist you can work through before your first October date.

What Actually Changes On 1 October For Freelance Musicians

Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 comes into force on 1 October 2026. Until now, Right to Work checks have been a matter between employers and their employees. The new provisions stretch the idea of employment to cover three further arrangements: people engaged on a worker's contract, individual subcontractors, and people matched with work through online platforms.

The Home Office's draft Employer's Guide, most recently revised on 11 September, describes an individual subcontractor as someone who contracts with a person to provide work or services, where that person has in turn contracted with a third party. Read that description with a wedding in mind. The couple contracts with the band. The band, or the bandleader, then engages the players. Each player is providing services to someone who holds a contract with somebody else.

The penalties are the ones already applied to employers who get it wrong: a civil penalty of up to £45,000 per worker for a first breach and up to £60,000 per worker for a repeat breach. The defence, known as the statutory excuse, is available only to those who carried out a prescribed check before the work began and kept the evidence.

Why The Deputy System Sits Right In The Middle

The dep is the quiet engine of the working music economy. A regular keys player takes a better paid session and sends someone they trust. A pit chair in a long running show is covered three nights a week by names the fixer has used for a decade. Much of it happens by text, often the night before, on nothing more than a handshake.

The new rules treat substitution as its own category. The draft guidance describes it as an arrangement where a worker is permitted to send another individual in their place, including through a clause in a contract. Where that is allowed, the person who engaged the original worker may be treated as employing whoever turns up and performs. Keeping the statutory excuse then depends on having the prescribed arrangements in place before the substitute starts. The substitute must be checked, that responsibility cannot simply be handed to the player who is sending them, and the substitute should not begin work until the check is done.

That is the point the MU has raised. A bandleader who has never looked at a passport in a professional capacity may, from next week, be the person the Home Office regards as responsible for a drummer they have booked forty times. Familiarity is not a check. Twenty years of shared stages count for nothing as evidence.

Who Appears To Sit Outside The New Rules

Not everyone in the chain is caught. The draft guidance is explicit that the extended liability does not apply to a client, customer or end user who is simply buying work or services. A couple booking a band for their reception is buying a performance, and on the Home Office's own examples they sit outside the regime in the same way as a householder hiring a plumber.

Also outside are individuals running an independent business in their own name or through their own company who contract directly with their clients. A solo acoustic act invoicing a venue in their own name fits that description. The difficulty for bands is that most of them are not a single independent business. They are a bandleader holding the client contract and a group of freelancers engaged beneath it, which is precisely the chain the subcontractor definition describes.

The change is also not retrospective. The draft guide states that a civil penalty can only be imposed where the engagement began on or after 1 October 2026. Long standing arrangements do not need back checking tomorrow, but a player booked for a date from October onwards, including a dep called in for a single night, may well count as a fresh engagement.

What The Musicians' Union Is Still Waiting To Hear

The MU's request to the Home Office goes to the gaps that matter most for working musicians. The guidance was written with labour supply chains, agencies and delivery platforms in mind. It says little about a trade where one night's work passes through a client, a band, a bandleader and a dep, any of whom may be the client of someone else the following weekend.

The open questions are practical. Whether a player sending a dep counts as substitution when nothing is written down. Whether an informal band with no company behind it is treated as an employer at all. Whether the fixer, the musical director or the producer carries the duty for a theatre pit. Whether one check on a regular dep can be relied on across a season of dates. The final Code of Practice and guidance remain in draft at the time of writing, and the government's consultation response of 30 June acknowledged that smaller operators face a disproportionate burden. It did not offer an exemption.

Until the Home Office answers, the sensible working assumption is simple. If you book the players, you may be the person expected to check them.

A Pre October Checklist For Bandleaders, Fixers And Deps

None of what follows is legal advice, and the MU's guidance should take priority the moment it is published. These steps cost little, can be done this week, and leave you in a defensible position whichever way the clarification falls.

Map your contracts. For every date from 1 October, write down who holds the client contract and who engages each player. That tells you whose name the duty would attach to.

Check your regular players once, properly. The prescribed routes are a manual check of original documents from the Home Office lists, the Home Office online service using a share code, or a registered digital verification provider. Check every player the same way, whatever their accent, name or background. The code on avoiding unlawful discrimination runs alongside the new rules, and treating players differently creates a liability of its own.

Build a checked dep list. Check deps before their first engagement, never on the night. Agree in writing that a dep cannot send someone else without your approval.

Keep the evidence. Retain a clear copy of what you checked, stored securely, for the length of the engagement and two years after it. It belongs alongside your contracts and your insurance certificate, which our guide to public liability insurance covers in detail.

Diary the expiry dates. Where a player's permission to work in the UK is time limited, a follow up check is needed before it runs out.

Tighten your dep terms. If your agreements with players allow substitution, state plainly that any substitute must be approved and checked before they play.

The deputy system is one of the reasons live music in this country works at all. It lets a player take the session that pays the rent without letting a client down, and it gives younger musicians their first rooms. Nobody drafting immigration law set out to disrupt it, and the MU is right to press for an answer that reflects how the trade operates. Until that answer comes, a folder of checked documents is a small price for keeping every number in your dep list usable. Watch for the MU's update, and act on it the day it lands.