Deliveroo sacks more than 100 drivers in crackdown on illegal migrants

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*By Luke Barr, Assistant business editor, 16 Feb 2025 – 08:30AM GMT*

Deliveroo has sacked more than 100 riders as part of a crackdown on illegal immigrants in its workforce.

The London-listed food delivery giant has culled 105 workers who illegally shared their rider accounts with undocumented workers, the company has told MPs.

Deliveroo confirmed the figures after coming under increasing government scrutiny over the number of illegal migrants working for the company. They have been able to infiltrate Deliveroo’s workforce as so-called substitutes, which is an arrangement where they work on behalf of a person who has a registered account.

Abuse of that system has led to mounting political pressure on companies such as Deliveroo, Just Eat and UberEat, all of which were ordered to appear before the Commons business and trade select committee last month to discuss employment rights.

Robert Jenrick, a former immigration minister and now the shadow justice secretary, last year accused the substitutes system of fuelling illegal immigration and putting public safety at risk as companies were failing to carry out proper right-to-work checks.

This prompted the likes of Deliveroo to toughen up controls as they seek to weed out those working for the company illegally.

Many delivery 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.

In a letter to the business and trade select committee last week, Paul Bedford, Deliveroo’s director of policy, said: “We have off-boarded 105 Deliveroo riders since April 2024 due to their substitutes providing invalid right-to-work documents.

“To be clear, a substitute rider must have their right-to-work status verified before they can complete any orders with Deliveroo.”

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 Channel were found to have been earning up to £1,500 per month from food deliveries while staying in government-funded hotels.

While the crackdown on illegal delivery riders was launched by the former Tory government, Labour has since taken on the mantle as part of its efforts to “smash” asylum gangs.

In a attempt to reassure the Government, Deliveroo has recently provided Justin Madders, the employment rights minister, with a dossier on how it is tackling the problem. A Whitehall source said the issue of illegal immigrants operating across its workforce remained an “area of concern”.

A spokesman for Deliveroo said: “Deliveroo has led the industry in taking action to secure our platform against illegal working. We were the first to roll out direct right to work checks, a registration process, daily identity verification and now additional device checks for riders, including substitutes.

“We take our responsibilities extremely seriously and continue to strengthen our controls to prevent misuse of our platform. We would encourage the Government to ensure all major platforms urgently adopt the same standards.”

Those who illegally shared their accounts are essentially engaging in modern slavery and should be prosecuted as such.

I remember seeing a woman’s name on the app with a scooter as the vehicle and a guy in a car delivered it.

Hmm. If you have 2 or 3 illegals in your employment then perhaps that’s a mistake … 100 however …

If I was a nefarious company trying to use illegal workers at slave wages with plausible deniability I’d allow my registered drivers to use substitute drivers too.

Am I missing something? They can’t just have found out about this in the last few years? They must have been aware for a while before 2023? I feel like there should be a larger investigation going on into why this was allowed to happen in the first place. I mean, money, obviously, but there needs to be a proper explanation for this.

> 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 Channel were found to have been earning up to £1,500 per month from food deliveries while staying in government-funded hotels

40% of all delivery drivers working illegally! Wouldn’t be paying national insurance, income tax or insured for their vehicle. Putting strain on public services but not paying into the system whilst artificially lowering the cost of labour. For those living in private accommodation they’d also be increasing the cost of the rental market.

As a occasional deliveroo driver (who has his own account, fully insured and who has the right to work here) some contexts:

It is in deliveroo’s (and the same will go for justeat and ubereats) interest to have people working for you who cannot find employment in another way, like people who have the right to work here do. On nights where there’s few orders and many riders out, the pay per order will likely be between £2ish and £4, often regardless of distance. For me as it’s a fun thing to do on the side, i can choose to go home on evenings like these as it’s not worth my expenses of fuel and PAYG insurance. Those who can’t find other employment are desperate and will take anything, even for those relatively low amounts.

If the delivery companies took a hard stance on right to work etc, they would lose a significant chunk of their pool of drivers (leading to them having to pay drivers more, as order values increase the longer they have been sitting waiting for a driver) as well as the remaining riders being more conscious about values (they will go home if it’s not worth it).

I’m not defending them as frankly it is in my interest as someone who goes by the book of legal requirements (and the expenses that follow) that all others are held to the same standard as it will only increase my earnings. Just as a context.

Over the last year or so they have been implementing more frequent identity checks, including when a different device logs in to a deliveroo rider account. I’ve seen quite a lot of pushback from riders in various media which may be indicative of how many drivers may not follow the law to the letter.

In regards to people saying the app says driver X is coming on a bike and driver Y turned up in a car, this is most likely a rented account. Fb marketplace is full of them. It’s incredibly dodgy but if they want to upkeep the self-employed status of all their riders they have to offer the right to substitutions. Intended for my wife to go driving on my behalf when i get sick, it gets abused by those wanting to ride with multiple accounts.

Personally I do it mainly for fun as it is genuinely quite fun to do on the side while making an extra penny. Very few people get upset at the sight of their food being delivered and having hundreds of small interactions with random people I’ll likely never meet again has had a pretty positive impact on my social skills too 🙂

My girlfriend recently reported an Uber eats driver because the picture was a women and a man showed up.

They just replied they’re independent contractors so sometimes others will show up.

That is … Insane. So you have no oversight of who actually works for you?

If they were doing this every single month it wouldn’t get anywhere close to clearing the problem.

We need to start holding businesses criminally responsible for committing crimes.

wow 100. that must be the equivalent of some of a towns worth of delivery drivers. drop in the ocean but a start.

All this should be banned anyway. Also anyone ordering from these sites are just fuelling the problem.

Am I being naive in believing this is easily resolved by actively challenging the contractors? It feels like an easy government win to make a point of inspecting and fining them. With sufficient public news of the risk/cost of renting the app to those without authorisation to work, it feels like it’d resolve itself as the incentive vanishes. That without having to make up new laws. Pure enforcement and publicity

Honestly just find all these companies, their practices and even just the sight of their workers zipping around cities dystopian as fuck.