No to the transfer, and yes to the liability — both come from the same 2024 licensing regime, and both catch a buyer who checked the wrong entity’s licence.
Short answer
ESA s.74.1.9 provides that a temporary-help-agency licence “is not transferable” — an asset buyer is a new legal person and needs its own licence before operating as an agency, whatever the seller’s licence status was. Separately, s.74.18(1)–(2) makes every client of a licensed agency jointly and severally liable for wages the agency fails to pay, apportioned by hours used — a liability that reaches a buyer using someone else’s staffing agency, not just a buyer acquiring one.
A buyer confirming that a target’s staffing supplier holds a current licence is checking the client-side risk under s.74.18. A buyer acquiring the staffing agency itself is checking a different thing entirely: whether its own newly formed entity, not the seller corporation, will hold a licence in its own name from the day it starts invoicing clients and running payroll for placed workers. Verifying the seller’s licence is current answers the first question and says nothing about the second — s.74.1.9 makes the seller’s licence stay with the seller regardless.
Section 74.18 imposes joint and several liability on every client of an agency whose licence lapses, apportioned across all clients by hours used, without regard to whether any individual client knew the licence had lapsed. A separate, harsher provision catches a client that continues booking an agency it knows is unlicensed: s.74.1.1(2) makes that the client’s own strict-liability offence, independent of anything the agency itself did wrong.
The client-liability side decided temp agency and recruiter licensing, and the client’s own liability. The non-transferability of the agency’s own licence is the subject of the agency licence that does not transfer with the assets.
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