--- title: "What Can a Previous Employer Say in a Reference? A UK Request, Graded" description: "Acas leaves the detail to the referee, the Equality Act fences off health, and the ICO wants the whole process declared up front. We grade a typical UK reference request and rebuild it." author: "Marcus Telle" category: "Hiring Playbooks" date: 2026-10-18T14:15:00.926Z canonical: "https://theartofpeople.io/blog/what-can-previous-employer-say-in-reference-uk" --- # What Can a Previous Employer Say in a Reference? A UK Request, Graded ![write, board, hand](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2014/06/07/10/49/leave-364178_1280.jpg?w=1200&q=75) > Acas leaves the detail to the referee, the Equality Act fences off health, and the ICO wants the whole process declared up front. We grade a typical UK reference request and rebuild it. The call lasted under a minute. A name, a job title, three brisk questions, a cheerful goodbye. The hiring manager set the phone down feeling she had taken a proper reading on the candidate. What she had collected was a mood, plus one question she had no business putting to anybody. Graded against five tests, that request earns three points out of ten. Here is where the missing seven went, and what to send instead. Below we take apart a composite UK reference request and grade it on five criteria: lawfulness, fairness to the candidate, comparability, job relevance and respect for the referee. Each scores zero for harmful, one for adequate, two for strong. It is written for employers who take up references and for managers asked to supply them. Read it as an editorial summary of published UK guidance, not as legal advice on your own situation. ## Exhibit A: Forty Seconds on the Phone The specimen is a composite, assembled for this piece from the kind of request that circulates in British hiring. No real person and no real employer is involved. Three questions carry the whole call: "Would you say she was a team player?", "Did she take much time off?" and "Any reason we shouldn't hire her?" They feel efficient. They produce nothing you could lay beside another candidate's answers and compare. ## Where Each Question Falls Apart ### "Would you say she was a team player?" A team player in what sense: generous with credit, calm in a disagreement, willing to pick up the dull half of a project? The referee answers whichever version came to mind, and you record a yes you cannot interpret. Swap it for something that forces a scene: "Tell me about a piece of work she handed over to somebody else. What did that look like?" A scene can be weighed. An adjective cannot. ### "Did she take much time off?" This is the question that does real damage. Section 60 of the Equality Act 2010 tells any employer receiving an application for work that it ["must not ask about the health"](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/60) of that applicant until work has been offered, subject to narrow carve-outs: whether the person is able to sit an assessment, whether an adjustment is needed for it, whether they can perform a function intrinsic to the job, diversity monitoring, positive action, and roles that genuinely require a particular disability. Routing the enquiry through a referee is, as we read it, the same question in a disguise. If a live decision turns on the point, put it to a solicitor rather than to us. Acas comes at it from the referee's side, and is blunter about what stays off the page. Absences ["related to"](https://www.acas.org.uk/providing-a-job-reference/what-employers-can-say-in-a-reference) disability, or to parental rights such as maternity and paternity leave, do not belong in a reference, and nor do adjustments put in place for a disability. ### "Any reason we shouldn't hire her?" An open invitation to volunteer anything, aimed at a person who has no idea what the job involves. You will get a shrug from a careful referee and a grievance from a careless one, and neither tells you about the role you are filling. The version that earns its place is specific: "Thinking about the job as I have described it, which part would play to her strengths, and which part would you watch?" That gives you a judgement anchored to your vacancy. ## Five Tests, Ten Points - **Lawfulness.** Keeps health and other protected characteristics out of the request. Scores zero: it asks about absence. - **Fairness to the candidate.** Asks for evidence rather than impressions. Scores one: the final question edges that way, the first does not. - **Comparability.** Every referee for every shortlisted candidate gets the same questions. Scores zero: this was improvised on a call. - **Job relevance.** Each question maps onto something the role demands. Scores one: "team player" is loosely tethered to the work. - **Respect for the referee.** Warns them, sets the scope, leaves room to decline. Scores one: polite, but a cold call all the same. Three out of ten. Zero to three means repair the template before your next vacancy. Four to seven is workable with edits. Eight to ten is a standard worth writing down and handing to whoever covers for you. ## What Acas and the Statute Actually Require Begin with the duty that does not exist. Acas states that an employer need not provide a reference at all unless it has promised one in writing, the role sits under a regulator that insists, or it was agreed another way, in a settlement for instance. Where one is supplied, the bar is short: it has to be [accurate and fair](https://www.acas.org.uk/references), and any opinion in it needs evidence sitting behind it. Acas also leaves depth to whoever writes the reply, unless their employer runs a policy on it. A fuller reference may cover why somebody left, and current and relevant disciplinary findings, while stale or irrelevant disciplinary history stays out. One line in that guidance deserves a frame on your wall: a reference [is not a substitute for making other checks](https://www.acas.org.uk/providing-a-job-reference/what-employers-can-say-in-a-reference), and the example Acas reaches for is confirming somebody's right to work. If you have been counting a reference as part of your compliance, our [guide to right to work checks](/right-to-work-checks-uk-employer-guide) sets out the thing you are actually obliged to do. So a two-line reply naming dates and a job title is not a coded warning. Very often it is somebody following the handbook. Read brevity as policy until you have a reason to read it as anything else. ## The Rule Most Employers Have Never Read There is a data protection duty sitting upstream of the phone call, and almost nobody honours it. The Information Commissioner's Office guidance on verifying candidates, which expressly includes checking references, says you [must explain the verification process early on](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/employment/recruitment-and-selection/verifying-candidates/), for example on the application form: the methods you will use, the specific information you will verify, how long you will keep what you collect, and any external sources you will lean on. That is a paragraph in your advert and your form, written once, reused for ever. The same page sets a limit on the request itself. Ask a referee only for the information you require, in line with your own recruitment policies, and the ICO's illustration is a referee asked to confirm employment dates and nothing more. It also records the exemption candidates rarely hear about: the personal information in a confidential reference is exempt from the right of access, so a subject access request does not automatically prise it open, and that protection covers references given in confidence rather than references in general. The ICO notes the guidance is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act, so read the page itself before you redraft a policy on the strength of a summary. The regulated exception is worth seeing in the flesh too, because it is the one setting where references are genuinely load-bearing. Financial Conduct Authority rules require a firm to take reasonable steps to obtain references covering [anyone who has been the candidate's employer in the past six years](https://handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/sysc22) for certain senior and certified roles, on a fixed template whose questions run from A to G and cover fitness, propriety and disciplinary action. Everybody filling in that form answers the same prompts in the same order. ## Stop Treating the Reference as a Tiebreaker Here is the position, and it cuts against the advice most hiring handbooks give. "Always take two references" is not a quality control measure. It is paperwork that feels like one. The reference is a verification step, and the moment you promote it to an assessment step you are ranking candidates on an instrument that cannot rank anything. Look at what the guidance itself concedes. Acas puts the level of candour in the referee's hands. The ICO tells you to ask for only what you need. An instrument whose output volume is set by somebody else's internal policy gives you one candidate with three paragraphs of warmth and another with a date range, and the gap between them is a difference in corporate caution, not in capability. Weighing those two against each other is noise dressed as diligence. Put the assessment where it belongs, in a consistent interview and a piece of real work, and our comparison of [consistent questioning against free-form conversation](/structured-vs-unstructured-interviews-hiring-guide) explains why the same logic rescues interviews. Then use the reference for the narrow job it can do: confirming the person held the role they described. One more piece of received wisdom needs correcting, carefully. People say that asking a referee about health is simply illegal and that the candidate will sue. The statute is more particular. A breach of the no-health-questions rule is enforceable by the Commission rather than by the applicant directly, and the asking alone does not breach a disability provision, though acting on the answer may. That is not a licence. It relocates the exposure to the decision you took afterwards, which is the part written down in your notes, and that is a worse place to be standing. Regulation is what overturns our call. Where a regulator mandates the reference, fixes the template and sets the look-back period, the comparability objection evaporates, because every firm answers identical questions across an identical span. Safeguarding regimes work the same way. If you operate under one of those, the reference is a gate, and you treat it as such. ## Fixes You Can Make Before Lunch - Strip absence, health, family plans and age out of your template today. - Add the verification paragraph to your application form: methods, information, retention, external sources. - Fix five questions tied to the job and put the same five to every referee. - Email the questions and your deadline in advance, and say that a dates-only answer is fine. - Let the candidate know which referees you will approach, and settle the position on a current employer first. If you want the questions themselves rather than the principles, our [reference questions template](/reference-check-questions-template-uk) carries a set you can paste. And because polished paperwork gets cheaper to produce every year, a point our piece on [AI-assisted CVs](/using-ai-on-your-cv-what-recruiters-think) takes up, the dull verification of dates and titles is quietly worth more than it used to be. ## If the Request Lands on Your Desk Most of this speaks to the employer doing the hiring, but the legal weight falls on whoever writes the reply. You need not go beyond what your own employer's policy allows, and Acas leaves the depth of it to you where no policy settles the matter. A short factual note is entirely respectable. If you add an opinion, have the evidence for it, keep a copy of what you sent, and remember that overstating performance fails the accuracy test exactly as understating it does. Where the true thing you could write is not a positive one, writing less is the safer craft. None of this will tell you whether a person will flourish on your particular team under your particular manager. A reference reports how somebody worked somewhere else, under conditions you cannot see. That is still worth having, and it deserves sharper questions than it normally receives. ## FAQ ### Does a previous employer in the UK have to give a reference? Usually no. Acas says there is no general legal duty to provide one. The exceptions are a written promise to give a reference, a regulated role where a regulator requires it, such as certain financial services positions, or an agreement reached another way, for example in a settlement. ### What standard does a reference have to meet if one is given? Acas says a reference has to be accurate and fair, must not mislead, and any opinion in it should have evidence behind it. That cuts both ways: overstating someone's performance fails the same test as understating it. ### Can I ask a referee about sickness absence? Tread very carefully. Section 60 of the Equality Act 2010 bars an employer from asking an applicant about health before work is offered, subject to narrow exceptions, and Acas says absence linked to disability or to parental rights should not appear in a reference at all. Take legal advice if a decision turns on it. ### Do I have to tell candidates that I will take up references? The ICO's guidance on verifying candidates says you must explain the verification process early on, for example in the application form, including the methods you will use, what you will verify, how long you will keep it and any external sources. It also notes that the guidance is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act. --- Source: https://theartofpeople.io/blog/what-can-previous-employer-say-in-reference-uk