GBTT | Great British Think Tank

Illegal working penalties map

A searchable map of civil penalties issued to UK employers, built from the latest Home Office table at the GOV.UK URL supplied.

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-Penalty notices
-Total penalties
-Mapped postcodes

Where penalties land

The data is point-level, not a survey or sample. Each marker represents one employer penalty in the Home Office table, geocoded from the published postcode and grouped by region for the chart below.


Penalties per 1,000 businesses

Raw counts track population: London leads because London has the most employers. Dividing each authority's penalties by its local business stock (ONS UK Business Counts, enterprises, 2024) gives a rate that controls for how many employers operate there. Authorities with fewer than three penalties are left out so a single case over a small base cannot top the list. Northern Ireland is not in this dataset.


Repeat appearances

Repeat status is matched on liable party and postcode across the named-employer releases recovered from GOV.UK and archived snapshots. It is a narrow test: companies that changed name, location or legal entity may not be caught.

Liable partyPeriodsTotal

Business types and directors

Business type is classified from the published trading name, with Companies House SIC codes shown in popups where a match is available. Director nationality is the declared Companies House officer field, counted only for active directors in matched companies.

Director nationalityActive directorsShare

Food hygiene overlap

Restaurants, takeaways, cafes, food shops, hotels and care settings are matched to the Food Standards Agency hygiene ratings API by postcode and business-name similarity. Low-rated here means a numeric rating of 0, 1 or 2.


Penalised, and licensed to sponsor

EmployerPenaltySponsor route

The naughty step

Most penalties carry a single breach. A smaller group stacks several negative signals at once: the same operator fined across more than one quarter, a 0-2 food hygiene rating, a company already dissolved or insolvent, or a current Home Office sponsor licence. The map's flag filter isolates these; the table lists those carrying two or more.

EmployerPenaltyFlags

Largest penalties

The largest entries matter because the published table is not just a count of visits. It shows the civil value attached to each breach after the penalty process.

Liable partyLocationPenalty
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