Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many companies were fined for employing illegal immigrants in each of the last five years.

The information requested is shown in the following table. The figures are based on the number of civil penalties issued to individual employers during each of the last five complete financial years. This includes public and private limited
companies, sole traders, partnerships and franchises.

The government is committed to taking effective action against employers of illegal workers. Illegal working drives illegal immigration which leads to exploitation of workers and is also linked to non payment of the national
minimum wage, harmful working conditions and tax evasion. Illegal working also undercuts legitimate businesses and adversely impacts on the employment of people who are lawfully resident in the UK.

The government has therefore taken measures to strengthen our approach to rogue employers. In 2014, we doubled the maximum civil penalty that can be levied against an employer to £20,000 per illegal worker and we used the Immigration Act 2014 to make it easier to enforce unpaid penalties in the courts. We have also extended our enforcement reach by working more closely across government departments to identify where illegal working is taking place and to enforce a range of sanctions against employers of illegal workers.