You just need something with you name and address. Bank statements, council tax, driver license (it doesn't even need to be a full one). It doesn't need to be a utility bill, it just often is one.
If you do not have a permanent address (I didn't for many years). You just need someone with a permanent address where these things can go e.g. friend or family member or you can pay a small amount for a letter box with a key (which is what I did).
> If you don’t have a passport, for instance, it’s much harder for a UK citizen to prove their right to work in the UK, for which your employer is liable if they get it wrong.
No it isn't. You need a Birth Certificate and a previous paycheck and something that has your NI number on it, and usually something to prove your address e.g. Utility Bill.
This has nothing to do with passport applications. He is talking about right to work checks. There is nothing excessive about them and they does not require even photo-card ID e.g. driving license / passport.
Also you don't have to insert your personal brand of politics into every discussion. There is nothing outrageous about the list of professions of counter signers. All they are wanting is someone that can be identified easily in a community.
A driving license isn’t sufficient for right to work checks because you can have a driving license without being able to work.
For shits and giggles, I just looked up the checker on the UK Gov website and… if you don’t have a passport or easy access to your birth certificate, you don’t have enough evidence of right to work.
Is this possible for most people? Yes. Does it leave groups excluded? Absolutely!
> A driving license isn’t sufficient for right to work checks because you can have a driving license without being able to work.
I never said that you required a driving license. I said that at driving license was photo-card ID.
You need a passport or birth cert and NI number as a British Citizen for a right to work check. Most employers also want proof of address, so bring a utility bill.
I've been through this process about 3 times in the last 5 years. It isn't difficult or onerous.
> For shits and giggles, I just looked up the checker on the UK Gov website and… if you don’t have a passport or easy access to your birth certificate, you don’t have enough evidence of right to work.
I actually posted the checklist. I am quite aware what is required.
You can literally order replacements for a birth certificate easily. A replacement birth cert can be got for £12.50 and takes 4 days to receive.
> You need a passport for a right to work check. I've been through this process about 3 times in the last 5 years. It isn't difficult or onerous.
A new passport costs over £100 for a paper application. That can be prohibitive for people.
> You can literally order replacements for these easily. A replacement birth cert can be got for £12.50 and takes 4 days to receive.
These are additional costs, it's also an extra £3.50 to find it (taking 15 days), and possibly another £38 to get it quickly.
So yes, these are all costs that add up to exclude people from partaking in society.
And all of this assumes your employer knows what the hell they're doing. Given the fines are painful, it's entirely possible your employer refuses valid documents "just in case" and sticks to the ones they've relied on in the past.
This is not an argument, and is merely a way to shut someone up because you don't like them disagreeing with you. It is quite a loathsome tactic.
> A new passport costs over £100 for a paper application. That can be prohibitive for people.
I agree that it is expensive. However you don't require a passport though and you can use a Birth Certificate and something that shows your NI number.
> These are additional costs, it's also an extra £3.50 to find it (taking 15 days), and possibly another £38 to get it quickly.
Ok. So £15. This is not "excessive" cost. Like with many things if you want something done more quickly you are required to pay extra.
If you are looking for work you really should make sure you have these documents as you should know that you are going to need them.
> So yes, these are all costs that add up to exclude people from partaking in society.
It may surprise you that a good number of things require monetary payment in some form or another to partake in society.
It is perfectly reasonable for the government to require basic checks to be carried out before you employed.
> And all of this assumes your employer knows what the hell they're doing. Given the fines are painful, it's entirely possible your employer refuses valid documents "just in case" and sticks to the ones they've relied on in the past.
I am not sure what you are trying to say here.
That to avoid fines an employer would break the law and not do right to work checks? Or that they are doing a right to work check and do additional checks?
> This is not an argument, and is merely a way to shut someone up because you don't like them disagreeing with you. It is quite a loathsome tactic.
Ok, let me break the argument down for you:
1. Person needs job
2. Person doesn't have job
3. Person therefore is low on money
4. Person needs to prove right to work to get job
5. Person needs money to buy proof of right to work (+ time to receive it)
6. Person needs money
7. See 2 and 3
Your privilege is what blinds you to a simple process.
> If you are looking for work you really should make sure you have these documents as you should know that you are going to need them.
This is what I mean by "your privilege is showing."
> That to avoid fines an employer would break the law and not do right to work checks? Or that they are doing a right to work check and do additional checks?
Read it again: they're skipping the checks and just using the one they know (passport) because they don't know if other legal forms of documentation are good enough. I know this is going to blow your mind but plenty of employers have no idea what the laws are. You might say "well that's on the employer," but it's the person who needs the job who suffers.
I understand this process that you outline can conceivable happen. However this scenarios is still extremely unlikely. Firstly the cost of a replacement Birth certificate is low.
Failing that, there are other support mechanism in place provided by charities, family, friends and even the state itself, in the unlikely event they are that are completely destitute.
None of this says anything about whether I am privileged or not. You know nothing about my personal circumstances or family background. The only reason anyone uses this line of argument is an attempt to shut people up or as a shaming tactic. Neither of which will work with me.
It also doesn't make any of the checks "excessive". It merely means that they may cost a relatively small amount of money.
As for the ability to produce basic documents, there is nothing privileged about being able to produce basic documents. What you are showing is simply a "bigotry of low expectations".
> Read it again: they're skipping the checks and just using the one they know (passport) because they don't know if other legal forms of documentation are good enough. I know this is going to blow your mind but plenty of employers have no idea what the laws are. You might say "well that's on the employer," but it's the person who needs the job who suffers.
I read it fine the first time thank you.
What you are describing now I would imagine is discriminatory and thus illegal. However IANAL. In this scenario the problem is with the potential employer in this circumstance. That isn't a problem with the right to work checks, and is a problem with the employer.
TBH. It really feels as if you are inventing reasons why right to work checks should be considered "excessive" to shoehorn in your own personal politics.
> However this scenarios is still extremely unlikely.
I watched a video just yesterday from someone (middle class) who explained that, by not having a passport, it took him weeks to get the necessary documentation together to prove his right to work in the UK. As a UK citizen.
> None of this says anything about whether I am privileged or not.
Oh boy, let's see:
> It merely means that they may cost a relatively small amount of money.
> What you are showing is simply a "bigotry of low expectations".
> What you are describing now I would imagine is discriminatory and thus illegal.
Out of this comment alone.
> I read it fine the first time thank you.
Except you completely misunderstood what I said, so you didn't "read it fine."
> However IANAL.
I can tell.
> the problem is with the potential employer in this circumstance.
Which primarily hurts the person who needs to work. What do you propose they do?
> TBH. It really feels as if you are inventing reasons why right to work checks should be considered "excessive" to shoehorn in your own personal politics.
I'm just pointing out how a mandatory Digital ID system, designed to prove right to work as a way of tackling illegal immigration (and thus illegal employment), could also benefit groups who aren't well-served by the current system.
> I watched a video just yesterday from someone (middle class) who explained that, by not having a passport, it took him weeks to get the necessary documentation together to prove his right to work in the UK. As a UK citizen.
This is an issues with the employer not following the checklist, which I posted in my first response to you.. That is not the fault of the legislation. The checklist is easy to understand and straight forward.
I do not have a passport (for quite a long time) and have no once had a problem proving my right to work with an employer.
> I'm just pointing out how a mandatory Digital ID system, designed to prove right to work as a way of tackling illegal immigration (and thus illegal employment), could also benefit groups who aren't well-served by the current system.
No that isn't true. You original claim was that it was "excessive". I took umbrage with that as it is a complete misrepresentation. It just isn't true and your scenarios that you presented are either unrealistic or not to do with the legislation itself.
Combine that with you being preoccupied about my supposed "privilege" as tactic to deflect from the point being made and making snarky backhanded comments, I no longer wish to talk to you. I am going to leave it there.
> Because you've had 4 opportunities to answer my basic question and can't?
No. It is because you've been rude several times to me without cause, you don't seem to actually read anything I say and therefore I no longer wish to talk to you.
I've done nothing but quote and answer your responses, while you ignore my questions and (wilfully?) misinterpret everything I say and projecting your own behaviour onto me. Don't be surprised that I have a low opinion of your contributions.
It implied there was something wrong with trusting every chiropodist and professional photographer more than any cook or army sergeant. It implied nothing about being middle middle class.
> When you look into these cases, they always turn out to be "a sustained campaign of harassment and abuse against one or more named individuals".
No that isn't the case. The are substantial problems in the UK around the the various hate speech and terrorism laws. Pretending there isn't by hand waiving away concerns and pretending that them being found not guilty later after having their life turned upside down (the process is the punishment) is quite honestly disingenuous.
> Once upon a time, design and code worked as one. Web designers would imagine beautiful designs and turn them into beautiful websites with HTML and CSS.
This was never the case and in fact a rewriting of history. My first "proper" job in web development was taking a PSD from a designer and turning that into a XHTML template. Quite a lot of the time the designs looked nice in Photoshop but were almost impossible to implement (at least in CSS 2).
I've worked in several since then and most were using Photoshop to create designs or design guidelines to pass over the developers. I used to "cut up the design" and then implement into XHTML template and controls. This was pretty much the norm everywhere if the company cared about how the website / webapp looked.
There were some frontend designer types that would write code, but I've met actually two of them during my career as a dev that was heavily front-end focused until 2023.
It was definitely true at some places. My first job was web dev using the LAMP stack. The "developer" side of the house would generally write something up, wrap everything in a bunch of divs, and hand it off to the "designer" half who would add CSS/assets and make it look good.
Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple.
I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop.
> It was definitely true at some places. My first job was web dev using the LAMP stack. The "developer" side of the house would generally write something up, wrap everything in a bunch of divs, and hand it off to the "designer" half who would add CSS/assets and make it look good.
So someone wrote a bunch of server code (backend) and then handed off for someone to style the frontend. This is what happens now in most teams. The person styling the frontend was never referred to as a "designer".
> Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of
the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple.
I am aware. However that isn't the norm in most places. What happens is that the best dev that can style stuff is lumbered with doing all the frontend work and most of their colleagues don't understand it.
Larger orgs have dedicated frontend/backend teams.
> I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop.
This are actually simpler than they were back then and there is better separate between the frontend and backend. So it actually easier IMO.
I have never heard the term designer used to describe anyone doing anything else other than creating PSD mockup and later on wire-frames.
I have worked in large corps and smaller agencies as a full stack / front-end dev for about 18 years.
This wasn't just the case in my part of the world. There were prominent online publication that were extolling the virtues of designers embracing creating their designs in CSS and HTML and moving away from using Photoshop.
No. I didn't think what I said was that difficult to understand. But I will break it down.
- Designers were not working with HTML and CSS (this was about ~2008-2011). I met one "designer" who would do HTML and CSS back in about 2015. I met another woman that could do it in 2022. I've worked in a bunch of web agencies and corps.
- Some designers due to emergence of smart phones had started experimenting with using HTML 5 and CSS 3 to create responsive designed.
- There were articles in online publications and blogs where people were extolling the virtues of it, trying to convince others.
- This ultimately didn't happen. People are still using Photoshop if they are not using Figma. You have dedicated front-end devs and/or teams in most orgs if they actually care about the UX/UI quality. Otherwise they just just use a bootstrap/tailwind theme and call it a day.
I stopped doing frontend dev primarily back in 2023 after I realised I was still fixing the same stupid iOS bugs from a decade before hand.
All I can say is that your experience from that time was very different from mine.
I don't really understand why you first claim that designers absolutely were not writing CSS and then go onto admitting that they even wrote articles about why everyone should.
That is a very clear contradiction. Clearly a lot of designers were writing CSS otherwise they wouldn't write about it...
> I don't really understand why you first claim that designers absolutely were not writing CSS and then go onto admitting that they even wrote articles about why everyone should.
I really don't know what to say with this statement. Obviously there were very few doing so, and trying to evangelise others into doing so. I think I made that crystal clear.
It seems you are getting hung up on the difference between "I've encountered this very rarely" and "none". If that is your complaint you are simply nitpicking. Which is what I suspect you are doing.
> That is a very clear contradiction. Clearly a lot of designers were writing CSS otherwise they wouldn't write about it...
No you cannot draw that conclusion. If there were already at the time "a lot" they wouldn't need to try to evangelise others to do so would they? There is no contradiction at all. Again this feels like you are angling for something that not there.
TBH from my interactions with you so far, It feels like you're wilfully misinterpreting my statements for gotcha. So I would rather we would leave it there.
Seriously. Talk about revisionist history. The web dev workflow before Figma was awful. It never “worked as one”.
I love Figma’s dev mode. Saves me and the designer time from measuring sizes and eyedropping colors. Figma also allows me to export assets myself instead of waiting for the designer to do it, or do it myself poorly from Photoshop.
The relationship between design and dev is much more collaborative now. It was downright hostile pre-Figma with photoshop and illustrator files. Nevermind versioning, sharing and comments…
Man, I started building websites and doing CGI coding in 1994 and 1995, which makes me a very early web developer and I don't remember this time at all.
In fact, I stopped coding as a job when it became expected that I would do back end database & business logic stuff AND fiddle with front-end code to make it work/look the same in 3 very different browsers, and update the code each time (I'm looking at you Microsoft) a browser vendor would do something stoopid.
Ah. I was managing teams of developers by then, and most of them had some front end skills, but we still needed dedicated people to deal with... I almost said "edge cases" but since they impacted every single project I guess they were not "edge cases".
I was still working on Safari Compatibility in 2023. The bugs I was fixing in both CSS and JS were present in the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4. I was utterly fed up of fixing the same stupid issues and decided to look for a more backend focused position. Unfortunately I am now working with AWS which has it own set of headaches.
Seems to be unavoidable in in the era of "move fast and break things" coupled with "let's make it proprietary so we don't have to defend our space with innovation" and incentives for staff to release features we didn't ask for nor want.
I am not saying that it was the same at every company and your personal experience may be different.
This was absolutely the norm at a lot of companies. It was very normal for the developers to work in either PHP or Ruby on Rails and the designers wrote CSS.
It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.
It was never the norm. I've worked as a contractor/consultant in a lot of places and I saw two people that were "designers" that could write HTML and CSS. That is two people in 18 years.
> It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.
None of these people knew CSS at all. I am talking pre-2012. Bootstrap version 1 or 2 was out at the time and 960 grid css was only out a few years before.
I think with maybe Flash 4? That's when we started pushing the envelope and some of our back end developers started working in Flash.
I was procedural programmer (came from Sysadmin - shell and perl) and I had zero desire to learn the whole timeline approach to actions (my memory is fuzzy) but I would give them endpoints to call server side!
The often cited YouGov polling, I think sampled a few thousand people. There are almost 2.5 million signatures on petitions between the OSA and Digital ID.
I can counter any of the iffy polls by simple point to the official online petitions service. There were a huge number of signatures to revoke OSA and two million signatures to abolish the plans for the Digital ID. While the Digital ID is technically a separate issue, many of the same privacy concerns are present.
The number of people that signed these petitions is far more representative than any polling.
On top of that, recently I've seen reportrs of both the Liberal Democrats and Reform (the two largest parties after the main two) recongising the OSA as unpopular and are likely to suggest reforming/removing it.
On top of that. The labour government and the conservative government that proceeded it which created the OSA were/are both deeply unpopular.
So any notion that there is a popular mandate for this is nonsense.
The Bristol young lib dems oppose it, but the parliamentary party doesn't think it goes far enough. The Bristol lot are great, I talked to them about it, but they're unlikely to change things on the national level.
That is unfortunate to hear. I don't really care for any of the political parties in the UK and tell them exactly what I think of them when they knock on my door.
I wouldn't trust them in young LibDems in Bristol either. Doesn't matter if they seem nice or not. Lots of young politicians have nice ideas and over time they either end up as bad as the ones they are replacing, they are forced out or leave of their own accord and then complain about it on a podcast.
There is a huge number of countries that will comply with the US. All of Western Europe, a good portion of Asia and the Pacific and plenty of other places that I've forgotten about.
If you are wanted in the Western world and the US wants you, you are likely to be got.
My favourite one though is "Fire in the Sky". I saw it years ago and thought it was a decent movie, but I laughed when it said "based on a true story".
If you do not have a permanent address (I didn't for many years). You just need someone with a permanent address where these things can go e.g. friend or family member or you can pay a small amount for a letter box with a key (which is what I did).