More delivery riders who are caught sharing their accounts with migrants who have no right to work in the UK will be suspended, under a Home Office agreement with food couriers Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats.
The delivery firms will receive new information concerning the locations of asylum seeker hotels to help tackle illegal working.
Under existing security measures, any delivery riders caught sharing their accounts with migrants without a right to work are suspended, but the new agreement will help ensure more people who are breaking the rules can be caught.
Efforts by Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats to clamp down on illegal account sharing through real-time identity and right-to-work checks have led to thousands being offboarded from their platforms.
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Under the new agreement, the food couriers will be empowered to go further in detecting patterns of misuse, identify unauthorised account sharing and quickly suspend accounts.
The move follows commitments made by the firms during a roundtable last month, including increased facial verification checks and fraud detection tools, meaning only verified users can access their platforms.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Illegal working undermines honest business, exploits vulnerable individuals and fuels organised immigration crime. By enhancing our data sharing with delivery companies, we are taking decisive action to close loopholes and increase enforcement.”
She added that there has been a 50% increase in raids and arrests for illegal working since Labour came to power.
Eddy Montgomery, director of enforcement, compliance and crime at the Home Office, said: “This next step of co-ordinated working with delivery firms will help us target those who seek to work illegally in the gig economy and exploit their status in the UK.
“My teams will continue to carry out increased enforcement activity across the UK, and I welcome this additional tool to disrupt and stop the abuse of our immigration system.”
An Uber Eats spokesperson said: “Uber Eats is fully committed to tackling illegal work and will continue to work with the Home Office and industry. We have introduced a range of state-of-the-art detection tools to find and remove fraudulent accounts. We are constantly reviewing our tools and finding new ways to detect and take action on people who are trying to work illegally.”
Deliveroo said: “Deliveroo has led the sector in introducing security measures to prevent the abuse of our platform and tackle the sophisticated criminals seeking new ways to exploit all delivery platforms’ systems. We are fully committed to working with the government as we continue to collectively combat illegal working.”
A Just Eat spokesperson said: “Just Eat is committed to tackling any illegal working via our platform. We continue to invest significant resources to strengthen our systems against abuse by individuals and organised criminal groups seeking to evade right-to-work rules. We are working closely with the Home Office and our industry partners to address any loopholes in the industry’s checks, as well as collaborating on data sharing and enforcement.”
However, Emma Brooksbank, immigration partner at law firm Freeths, said it expected the strategy to be ineffective. She said: “The intention is that Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats will quickly cancel accounts which are noted to be repeatedly active in high-risk areas, around asylum seeker hotels. It will not be difficult for illegal workers to bypass this restriction and avoid detection, thereby making the agreed data sharing pointless.
“Companies like these gig economy operators are largely unregulated, and as such, the usual right-to-work penalties of £60,000 per illegal worker do not apply to them. They have no real incentive to clean up their act.
“The simple fact is that gig economy companies do not know who is using their app, and who is engaging with their customers under their brand name, making illegal work easy, effortless, and undetectable, which acts as a draw for illegal migrants to continue to arrive in small boats from France.
“The government needs to take a much tougher approach. Real-time facial identity could be used by the companies when every job is accepted on the app. No illegal worker should ever be paid by these companies for work they are undertaking; the companies need to be held responsible for investigating account sharing, and importantly, the companies should be heavily fined, and company directors disqualified, when they are found to be facilitating illegal work.”
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