Food delivery riders have become ubiquitous across Britain’s streets in recent years, feeding households that grow ever hungrier for takeaways.
Yet the rise of these “gig economy” workers, who made an estimated ￡14bn worth of deliveries last year, has not been without controversy.
Even as the likes of Deliveroo, Just Eat and UberEats have grown into multibillion-pound businesses, they have faced persistent allegations of low pay and poor working conditions.
More recently, critics have made an even more serious charge: that the industry has become a magnet for illegal migrants.
According to Home Office statistics, two in five delivery riders stopped during a series of random checks in April 2023 were found to be working illegally.
In some cases, asylum seekers who crossed the English Channel were even found to have been earning up to ￡1,500 per month from food deliveries while staying in government-funded hotels.
Many work as “substitutes”, an arrangement where they work on behalf of a person who has a registered account.
This relationship allows riders to choose how much work to take on and, if they wish, subcontract their deliveries to someone else.
But when coupled with lax “right-to-work” checks in the sector, critics argue this has created a backdoor that is too easily exploited.
Abuse of the system – in defiance of laws that ban asylum seekers and illegal migrants from working while their applications to remain are processed – only encourages more people to cross the Channel illicitly, warns Lara Brown, a senior policy fellow at the Policy Exchange think tank.
It also puts downward pressure on pay for riders working here legitimately.
“If it’s easy to work in the grey economy, it undermines the Government’s position,” Brown explains. “It also encourages traffickers to tell migrants that there’s work waiting for them.
“The other problem is it depresses wages here, because so long as Deliveroo and other companies [Just Eat and UberEats] have a stream of grey economy workers who are happy to take low-pay deals – mainly because they can’t work in the regulated economy – they will never pay their drivers more.”
The flow of work to illegal migrants has long been enabled by a thriving black market in food delivery, where existing riders provide their login details for others to use, albeit for a fee.
Illegal migrants will often accept the work because they are so desperate for cash.
For example, one man offered to “rent” his login via Facebook Marketplace to a journalist posing as an illegal Bangladeshi migrant, the Mail on Sunday reported last year.
He was running at least nine accounts, eight of which had been lent out. He offered to let the ninth for ￡70 per week.
Renting an account to someone in this way, without checking whether they have a right to work in the UK, has long been against the terms and conditions of Deliveroo, Just Eat, UberEats and other platforms.
However, enforcing the rules is difficult if someone is determined to deceive.
The nature of the job, conducted remotely via smartphone, immediately removes most of the normal checks and balances that allow employers to keep track of their staff, says Emma Brooksbank, an immigration lawyer at law firm Freeths.
“Part of the issue is the very nature of the gig economy,” Brooksbank says, “where [companies] actually have no face to face contact with the riders.
“There’s not the classic kind of employer-employee relationship, where somebody is coming into an office or into a restaurant or wherever to undertake the job. And so it’s actually very difficult to monitor the activities of notional employees – and that substitution problem can easily still arise.”
Meanwhile, because riders are technically freelancers, there is no legal duty on food delivery companies to carry out right to work checks on them – or their substitutes.
This means that if someone is found to be working illegally, the food delivery business will face no consequences. Whereas if a more conventional company was found to have not carried out sufficient checks on an employee who turned out to be an illegal migrant, they would face prosecution and the possibility of hefty fines.
“It’s a very difficult problem to solve because you are relying on voluntary actions being taken by the companies within the gig economy,” Brooksbank adds.
“Some of them have protectively taken steps to tighten things up, but that’s really more about reputational management than any statutory requirement to do something.”
Last year, however, government ministers finally lost patience with the abuse of the substitutes system and sought to apply pressure.
Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister and current Tory leadership candidate, accused the system of enabling illegal immigration and putting public safety at risk by failing to carry out proper right-to-work checks on substitutes.
It led to several of the companies, including Deliveroo, Just Eat and UberEats, vowing to carry out voluntary right-to-work checks on these subcontractors.
Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick accused the food delivery system of putting public safety at risk - Jacob King/PA Wire
This included plans to require people to register their own accounts and provide documents to be verified.
Several of the companies now require riders to periodically upload photos or videos of themselves – known as “selfie checks” – to prove that the person carrying out deliveries is the person registered to the account.
However, there remain concerns that some of these checks can be circumvented.
For example, a substitute rider could simply ask the main account holder to do the selfie check for them before carrying on with their deliveries.
Brown, at Policy Exchange, believes the only way to tackle the issue is to outlaw substitution and force food delivery companies to carry out proper checks by law.
“The problem right now is there’s no market forces encouraging the delivery apps to solve this,” she says.
“The incentives are massively in favour of ignoring the problem, because you have the chance to pay people very low wages and the companies themselves aren’t on the hook if someone’s found to be illegally working on the app.
“So I think the market could solve this, but it would have to be the case that Deliveroo and the other companies were facing the prospect of fines for employing people illegally.”
However, Brooksbank is more sceptical that real progress can be made under the existing legal framework.
She warns that outlawing substitution just for food delivery firms – without creating unintended consequences – will be tricky from a legislative point of view.
Meanwhile, the fundamental issue remains that checking a rider’s status is still largely up to companies who need them for deliveries.
Whether they can implement such rigorous checks while meeting Britain’s growing appetite for takeaways remains unclear.
“It’s hard to see exactly what the complete solution to the problem is,” Brooksbank admits.
A Deliveroo spokesman said: “We take our responsibilities seriously and have strengthened our controls to prevent platform misuse. We have introduced a market-leading, thorough registration process for substitutes to ensure their right to work is verified, enhancing our existing measures for main account holders.”
The company added that it remained “committed to working with the Home Office and industry leaders to support ongoing efforts”.
An Uber Eats spokesman said: “Uber Eats has launched identity verification checks to help ensure only those who legitimately use someone else’s account to earn with us are able to. We are constantly reviewing these processes to ensure they are as robust as possible.”
Just Eat added: “We take our responsibilities on this issue seriously and as part of our work with the UK Home Office, have introduced a register for couriers using substitutes, which includes spot checks to ensure account holders are conducting right to work checks required by law.
“This is just the first step we are taking to tackle this issue and our dedicated teams continue to explore additional measures we can implement to ensure couriers substituting their work do so safely and in accordance with the law.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “Illegal working undermines legitimate employers and employees, as well as our immigration system.
“Employers also have a critical role to play in combating illegal working, and we will be working closely with them to develop more preventative strategies.”
