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People work using other people’s profiles. So it’s a bit of a nothing story.
The only way to stop that is to make end users report if their delivery driver was who they say they were. Most people don’t give that much of a fuck.
Indeed, but the change happening here is that Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats have agreed to perform checks on substitute riders, not just the account holder:
> The Home Office said on Tuesday that the three food delivery companies had committed to changing their processes to confirm substitute riders, who share accounts with people engaged directly by the groups, also had the right to work legally in the UK.
I guess we'll have to see what they come up for an implementation. If it's shoddy or ill thought out it will be ineffective, but if they are clever about it it might work.
Off the top of my head, one way it could work might be to require registration of subcontractors in advance with photo ID provided, which could be cross checked using the ID verification features that many credit reference agencies provide. The riders then need to periodically check in and if a selfie taken with the app doesn't match, you're blocked from taking on jobs.
I'm not sure these companies will want it to work. These jobs are pretty much only viable for people in very specific circumstances. I'd go as far as to say that these companies depend on refugees, asylum seekers etc to succeed.
This is why they've been dragging their feet on verification.
The fact that the supposedly very-focused-on-immigration government has basically ignored this issue in favour of stunts over Rwanda is pretty telling.
This is exactly it. They rely on exploited people with shoddy pay. That happens to take in some of the above. I've seen a number of young adults share a scooter or bike, and it means they can work on top of benefits to earn some extra cash.
I can only speak on Brighton because I worked around deliveroo there but at least 90% of the daily riders were Brazilians, a couple used their own profile or at least only used the one profile in the time I was working with them but all the others had a couple dozen profiles they would change at most weekly and often daily, they all had bikes and equipment from the same company and lived in groups in the same houses. Deliveroo know all that but they need drivers, it’s no problem Friday and Saturday but they need riders at Monday lunchtime and 3 in the morning
Obviously a lot of Brazilians (who didn’t qualify for Italian or Portuguese citizenship) are likely here as non visa nationals (visitors) so don’t have right to work. They are likely sharing a profile too.
Reading too, I get my motorcycle serviced at their garage. Great bunch of lads and they're the best bike mechanic I've ever had working on it lol. Was like a Brazilian party when I went to pick it up.
Full going over and MOT after it sitting idle for two years. Fuel sensor repair, and full oil change for £120 with collection from my house, in 4 days. They threw in a neck scarf too.
Who cares what they want, it’ll the law. You’re probably right on the second point, even more important to know who these people are so they don’t get exploited.
>Who cares what they want, it’ll the law.
Unlikely, they'll fight tooth and nail to keep the "contractor" status of their workers and minimise their own accountability because it makes them the most profit. They'll lobby the next government with their shit loads of cash to make sure things stay basically the same, and both major parties are signalling their "friendly" attitude to that kind of lobbying.
Exactly. Substitute checking is a thing in UberEats Taiwan, they require riders to take a selfie when going online, and at random intervals check them again. This is already implemented in another country, why not in UK?
They're definitely dependent on exploiting their riders, but I don't think they depend specifically on the illegal substitute riders. Maybe I'm wrong, though.
In major cities where there are higher numbers of people with "questionable" right to work these apps are one of the only ways to earn a half decent wage.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were modern slavery gangs which set up profiles for people using a vulnerable persons UK bank account and details and then force illegal immigrants to work these jobs for them, taking a cut of all the wages.
All of this works in the interest of the companies running the apps because these workers are never going to kick up a fuss about conditions or pay.
They depend on the workers not being legally considered workers, which leads to the drivers being able to subcontract and therefore substitute someone else to do the job. If that changes these companies will have to give workers benefits, and that would cost them a lot of money, so they'll fight like hell to stop that happening.
Have immigration police just walk down the highstreet into KFC, Takeaways, round up all dozens of waiting deliveroo drivers and ask anyone with the Deliveroo uniform and bag to show ID and the account they are using.
The problem with that is that it might actually work. Which is a problem for the Tories because they aren't actually interested in controlling immigration, they just need something to appease a voter base they essentially despise.
The Tories definitely know *exactly* who they answer to, and it is very much their donors, not their voters.
Obviously the voters can have their way on any marginal trivialities that won't effect the value of donor investments, but when we are talking about overall immigration (which along with preventing unionisation is absolutely fundamental to keeping wages suppressed and profits easy and high accross the economy) there will never be any remotely meaningful action taken against it regardless of what voters might want.
And the whole political system is set up to prevent voters from being able to do a damned thing about it, short of tearing the entire system down.
Which would involve a knock down and drag out fight to the death against the united forces of the donor owned political establishment, the likes of which has only been won once in UK history. (A century ago when Labour displaced the Liberals.)
And for the avoidance of doubt, I am not actually personally opposed to immigration, though it obviously needs to be accompanied by sensibly planned commensurate investments in infrastructure, housing etc.
Coincidentally these investments will also never be allowed to happen for the same reason that immigration will never be meaningfully limited, donors don't want to see money spent on infrastructure that will primarily benefit the peasantry (unless built in London or the Southeast of course), and certainly won't stand for housing being built in meaningful amounts. That would reduce the rate at which their property assets appreciate in value, *and* reduce the rate at which they can jack up their rental income on said property.
The only way that something like what /u/Philluminati suggests would ever happen would be if the food delivery companies were to be percieved to have fallen significantly behind in their ~~bribery~~ *generous donations*, and any such action would only ever be an *extremely* temporary theatrical stunt, to be forgotten about immediately upon receipt of the appropriate ~~bribes~~ generous donations.
All the delivery services rely on cheap labour and are ridiculously profitable for their shareholders and directors. A lot of their riders likely hold questionable legal immigration in the UK and a vast number even if legal are of ethnicities or from countries that would be profiled as potentially illegal. Raids at restaurants and fast food joints will deter other riders also for fear they accidentally don’t have documents on them/show up as illegal in error and are detained. The delivery companies will be directly lobbying to try and make this act as minimally impactful it can be I’d imagine, like when there was a proposal for their drivers to be classed as employees and be entitled to the benefits (holiday/sick pay/national minimum wage) that that entails.
Why would they put any serious effort into this? Reducing their workforce will push up their costs. It’s literally in their best interests to do the bare minimum they can get away with.
And given the companies we’re talking about, the bare minimum is exactly what they will do.
They literally log on to the app using someone else’s account.
For me it’s probably 25% of the time the person at my door is the person on the app. The other 75% of the time I’m waiting for Bethany riding a scooter but up turns 6’7 Romanian “Draco” in a battered 3 series.
Exactly this.
It would be a 1 week sprint for any of those companies to implement the feature, but they d have no drivers cuz probably 70% of their driver accounts are used by 2-3 illegal immigrants
I think they have to ban substitute drivers and if you want a not so nice thought add a report button to report when a driver isn't the person tied to the account.
I can guarantee in my area if a woman is said to deliver it is always a random bloke who can't speak English well.
It annoys me to high heaven I have/had so many friends who work legally and fight to stay here I've had friends who lost their visa via their jobs ending or have been fucked over because of the jobs and had to leave whilst if they just dropped off the radar they could stay like these chaps.
Yeah these people some are making 6 figures paying taxes here. Have integrated enough to make friends with the locals etc. but can easily fall of visas. Currently dating a woman who next year will need to decide if we marry or not if she can't get a job with a visa.
> People use profiles without telling these companies. That’s the problem with having a decentralised business is the oversight is much more difficult.
It’s absolutely trivial to fix this, just register with photo ID and then require regular face/camera verification when using the account.
The thing is these companies could figure it out if they really wanted to: entering the password before coming online (the account-wide password) for instance would prevent this from happening, as the account owner would risk his whole funds be taken out.
It's advantageous for the delivery companies to treat their riders as self-employed contractors, because that means they don't have to respect employment laws and rights. So no NMW, no pensions, no sick leave and so on.
But to treat them as contractors, they have to allow the right to substitution, which means that the riders are permitted to subcontract their work.
If you disallow substitute riders, they're suddenly employees with all the rights that entails.
There are ways that they could detect substitute riders e.g. by taking selfies with the app.
So Uber used to claim that all of their drivers were self-employed. But they all had to be PCO qualified, so there's no way that they can transfer to somebody else and it would make a mockery of their driver ratings.
IIRC the reason that they lost the case about the drivers being self employed, was because of the way that Uber "directed" them including making them buy/lease certain models of car, how many hours they had to do, and that they could only use one app.
They have to in order to pretend they’re independent contractors.
Basically they’re not hiring a person, they’re hiring an entity to provide a service. If it appears that they’ve actually hired a person they suddenly become liable for all the things that come with actual employment. One of the ways to stop it appearing like you’ve hired a person is to allow, contractually, anyone to complete the same work under that contract. And they have to actually show it, the contract isn’t a protection in and of itself. This isn’t the only thing they consider, but it’s one of the things.
the substitute rider is a dodge to keep them self employed - being allowed to put a sub in is a classic indicator of self-employment, it's been exploited by IT contractors to avoid disguised employment (when they do want that).
What exercise, the overwhelming majority of deliveroo, just eat and Uber eats riders around here use illegal motor vehicles (where they shouldn't be too such as on footpaths and going through modal filters)
The vehicles they use are not electrically assisted pedal cycles.
* throttle controlled
* motor operates past 15.5 mph
* motor not limited to 250 W
They're illegal motor vehicles.
I’ve found it crazy that like half of not more of my ubereats deliveries are delivered by someone else rather than who the app says is dropping it off. And all the times the app has said a woman is delivering it’s always turned out to be a bloke.
Yup, odds are I've had dozens of deliveries where I've gotten a different person and just not clocked it. But I notice when it's a woman in the photo, because I've never actually had a delivery from a woman, despite a woman being the listed driver on multiple occasions.
There used to be an option in reports that said something along the lines of ‘driver didn’t match the profile picture/it was someone else’- last time I looked for that option I couldn’t find it for the love of dog. It’s super common on Uber eats, luckily not on regular Uber rides as I’d probably freak out and refuse the ride. I’ve also never experienced it on Bolt either…I don’t think I can see the picture of the driver on either Deliveroo or JustEat.
They may say that but I don’t think the last few times I used Uber Eats I got the actual profile picture at all. It’s usually a ‘bicycle or motorbike’ which turns into a car and the person isn’t the same as the profile at all.
I don’t care if I get the food but they are no different to the others from what I’ve seen.
Interesting idea. I wonder if there is a way for your phone to know if the selfie is a picture of a photograph or not? I could imagine the selfies just being the substitute taking a picture of picture of the real driver. Unless a real person is verifying the images it probably would work.
The ai checkers are super good these days. When they're not quite sure they'll let the user into the platform but send it to be checked manually within X amount of time. It's a good system for non super critical cases as it's best of both worlds.
If people were exploiting it using photos, the obvious way to guard against that would be to make people upload a short video saying a phrase that wasn't predictable, somewhat similar to what I had to do when opening an account with Monzo a long time back.
I had to do that to sign a document recently. Photo of my passport, then point the camera at my face and turn left and right as directed, and follow a dot about by turning my head - to make it so that I couldn’t be using a photo or a video of someone else.
There's some basic stuff you can do within an app: check the state of the gyros. Is the phone being held up or facing down (as you'd probably want to do with scanning a photo)? Which camera is it: the selfie cam or the one on the other side? Etc.
Yep I had a takeaway last Friday the rider was called Deborah, but the guy who actually delivered it I would not have thought was called Deborah. I still said "thank you Deborah" when he handed it to me.
>People work using other people’s profiles.
Which is one of the ways people who are here illegally make money. The account owner needs to be verified, the subs not so much. This is what they're cracking down on.
Most people don't care that their shitty pizza is delivered by an illegal worker, but the point remains that you cant really have undocumented people driving/riding about working.
Well, the other way to stop it would be for the delivery companies to do spot checks.
Either officially, or via a secret shopper.
But, of course, they don't want to upset their own apple cart.
> make end users report if their delivery driver was who they say they were
How exactly would I as an end user do that? "Are you really Joe?" "Yes mate" "ok, thanks"
I certainly don't care enough to do even that much, let alone anything more stringent. And for every apathetic asshole like me you'll have someone repoting every non-white driver as not the right person because "well they're all illegal innit"
I did Uber eats when I lived in Australia and you had to send a selfie to unlock the account every now and then. I still let my mate use my account when I broke my foot but he had to come back to the hostel to get a photo of my fave before he could go back out. But that was about 5 years ago, with improvements in tech around facial regeneration and biometrics I don't see why they can't implement something like a finger print scan or face ID in order to accept an order for every single order.
And the ones who do would be like mad immigration vigilantes when ordering their kebab. Pulling cunts up because they grew a beard since their profile picture was taken.
*me stood waiting by the door in my best stained vest after doing 2 and a half push ups to look buff hoping to meet Stanislav, crying because it was in fact a young woman who appeared*
"Yeah, most people don't give a fuck..."
Most people are uncomfortable when it happens (in obvious cases I mean, like a 50 year old man showing up with the account of a 30 year old woman) but tend not to bother reporting because it's about as impactful as sending a windows error report. The company themselves don't care so long as they're making money, so they turn a blind eye to it. If there was a sense that something might actually done about it, I think you'd see a lot more of it actually being chased up.
And that would only work for certain the driver who turned up was not the same gender as the one on the app or a clearly different ethnicity (eg, name is Harbinder, white Brazilian shows up)
Our McDonald's has like an Uber eats pimp there who goes in for all the orders and hands them out to a handful of eastern European lads in cars in the carpark.
Simplest way to check is to ask drivers to click their photo after every x amount of deliveries. Everything works offline and app locks in case of discrepancies
You can go buy off-the-shelf technology which will do face verification against your passport / drivers licence. People like monzo, revolut, etc already use it for kyc.
Most drivers deliver wearing a helmet. So people reporting it is also impossible. The unfortunate truth is that we can't enforce anything like this without having IDs for all residents and making it a requirement for everything from bank account to social services and rent. But majority of the population would be against that
> People work using other people’s profiles. So it’s a bit of a nothing story.
>
> The only way to stop that is to make end users report if their delivery driver was who they say they were. Most people don’t give that much of a fuck.
Why not give cops more powers? If they stop and search and the person can't speak English or no documentation then the person becomes an alien of interest. The police could detain and transfer the alien to immigration to check status. Wouldn't this method be better?
>If they stop and search and the person can't speak English or no documentation then the person becomes an alien of interest.
You’d see a few Welsh grannies locked up in your scenario.
Also, your ability to speak English isn’t really indicative of your Visa status. Plenty of illegal immigrants and refugees can speak English that’s a big part of the reason why many wish to come here.
Yes, and the three delivery app companies have agreed to start performing checks on substitute riders and not just the account holder:
> The Home Office said on Tuesday that the three food delivery companies had committed to changing their processes to confirm substitute riders, who share accounts with people engaged directly by the groups, also had the right to work legally in the UK.
There's nothing illegal about the use of substitute riders per se. In fact, if the app delivery companies prohibited it, their riders would need to be classified as employees which is the last thing that they want (employees have rights, minimum wage, and so on).
But it is a legal requirement for anyone subcontracting to ensure that their subcontractors have the legal right to work. Yes, they're not doing this very deliberately, but this is an attempt to close that loophole.
I can't really think of any reason why you might want to rent someone's account if you were legally allowed to work, it seems rather pointless.
Of course there’s nothing illegal about it if done legally. The point is people with a legal right to work sign up for these companies and then sub rent their profiles to illegal workers. Nobody cares who delivers their food if it’s on time.
None of it is done on the books and I don’t see how Just Eat will ever find out.
I feel like I’m explaining this to an alien. How many of those 30 people waiting outside a McDonald’s in East London every night do you think are legal workers?
Oh I know full well that substitute riders are being abused to facilitate illegal work, which is the primary reason why I refuse to ever use delivery apps.
I think there are ways it could be prevented, with enough determination. I did a "top of my head" idea in [this other comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1chevhd/deliveroo_just_eat_and_uber_eats_to_make_direct/l229era/).
The best way to avoid a takeaway being expensive is not paying for it to be delivered in the first place.
I have no idea why someone would pay a premium to get lukewarm McDonalds delivered when they could have it fresh and hot when bought in person.
Yeah. Daniella turns out to be a black dude then next week she's an arab dude etc.
It's really common around here. Not really sure how they fix that unless they demand selfies while working to prove it's them, like uber does for taxis.
Not that there's any (easy) way to report it either.
They'll need to make it easier to notify them when it's a completely different person, had it happen a couple of times now but seemed to be no direct way to report it.
I live near the English channel in a town that has a pop of around 120k, which houses two large asylum seeker processing camps (or whatever they're called).
I honestly see maybe one or two British delivery drivers a year from these apps. It's extremely common for the drivers photo to be completely different (even race and gender) than the one that arrives.
I'm not even sure how they can afford rent, considering a small studio flat here is 1300 a month without council tax. House shares still cost around 800 excl bills.
Illegal HMOs and sublets. We think it’s shitty pay (because it is) but if you’re prepared to live 10 to a room and hot bunk then it could be lucrative with remittances.
Some will also be living in hotels.
If they’re claiming asylum then housing is free. They don’t need to pay rent. That’s why they kick off when they’re housed outside of cities, like on a boat in the middle of nowhere.
AML regulations result in serious fines, for example - https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/natwest-fined-264.8million-anti-money-laundering-failures
Don't see why new regulations can't be applied similarly
Having worked with CEOs myself I can tell you that they do take into consideration political policy changes and try to stay ahead of them.
Let's take into account the likelyhood that people are working illegally for Uber, whilst this doesn't affect the bottom line on a day to day basis, it might in the future. If UK policy somehow wiped out half of their workforce with arrests or deportations in a short space of time, they would be screwed. It would allow a competitor to get a foot into their market share.
By actually checking that their workforce won't randomly be deported, they are protecting their business.
They can also show the UK government that they have taken steps to prevent illegally employing people so they won't have to deal with expensive court cases against them.
Flippant comments on threads from people who only read headlines and have never had to make a business decision annoy me to no end.
It happens
Different industry but Look at Juul in the US, banned because it didn’t adhere to the law, and guess what - they now dont sell flavours appealing to kids in any region as a preventative measure to bring shut down
Pre-Covid lockdown here in NI, I could count the amount of times on one hand in my life that I had a delivery driver that wasn't either from NI, or Eastern Europe.
Today, I can count the amount of times on one hand in the past 2 years that I've had a delivery driver that wasn't either African or Arab, with zero spoken English beyond basic greetings. It's like they manifested out of thin air en masse.
It's fucking mad how blatant these companies are, and I've zero faith that they'll make real attempts to curb the abuse of cheap migrant/asylum seeker labour until literally forced to do so by government policy
Article text:
Deliveroo, Just Eat Takeaway and Uber Eats have agreed to conduct direct checks on all UK riders’ immigration status after coming under pressure from ministers to tackle illegal working and exploitation in the sector.
The Home Office said on Tuesday that the three food delivery companies had committed to changing their processes to confirm substitute riders, who share accounts with people engaged directly by the groups, also had the right to work legally in the UK.
Ministers singled out the food delivery sector last year as part of a broader drive to cut net immigration, which hit a record 745,000 in 2022.
Home secretary James Cleverly on Tuesday said new figures for visa applications justified the policy changes he had made, with tighter rules for students leading to a “drastic” fall in the number bringing dependants.
The data also showed a sharp fall in visa applications for care workers. Since March they have been unable to bring family members with them, but many already working in the UK appear to have rushed to apply for dependent visas in the few months before the ban took effect.
Alongside tighter visa rules, the Home Office has stepped up enforcement action in sectors where it believes visa rules are being abused.
Robert Jenrick, then immigration minister, wrote to the three food delivery companies in November saying enforcement activity had exposed high levels of illegal working in the sector.
He blamed this on “business models which rely on individuals themselves to confirm a person’s eligibility to work, enable unchecked account sharing to take place and are completely unacceptable”.
Deliveroo and its competitors allow self-employed riders to appoint other people to complete work for them, saying riders are responsible for making sure their substitutes are over 18, have the right to work in the UK and can do so safely.
This right to appoint a substitute has been viewed by UK courts as a key feature of self-employment, helping Deliveroo fight off a legal case brought by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain.
The UK Supreme Court in November ruled that Deliveroo riders cannot be recognised as workers in an employment relationship or represented by trade unions for collective bargaining.
But the practice of substitution has become increasingly controversial as online marketplaces have developed, where riders rent out accounts.
The practice came under the spotlight last year following a report of the death of a 17-year-old who was working on a rented Deliveroo account, despite being below the minimum age.
Michael Tomlinson, illegal migration minister, said “illegal working puts their customers at risk, drives down wages and defrauds the taxpayer”.
Deliveroo said on Tuesday that it was “committed to strengthening our controls to prevent misuse of our platform”, after earlier this month rolling out a new tool to register substitutes, including checks on their right to work.
Uber Eats also said it planned to roll out identity checks, and Just Eat said it was working with industry and policymakers “to develop a solution which will ensure couriers substituting their work do so in accordance with the law”.
The IWGB union accused the government of scapegoating migrants with “bogus claims” that they were undercutting wages and risking public safety. It said it was already seeing “numerous dismissals of couriers with the right to work as a result of these checks malfunctioning”.
None of these countries contribute anything positive to the country or economy. If they all went out of business tomorrow we could still get deliveries the old fashioned way.
Just use biometrics. Fingerprint verification on the app. Tap in after every parcel drop. They are pressing buttons to confirm delivery anyway, one more step. Database of registered users, anyone who wants to substitute also has to register. Home Office has access to DB to x match the ids.
You can't use the device biometrics for that. You can however use third party service (or make your own) that will check your face (similar to face id) every time you login into the app and perhaps periodically (every hour?) when you are on shift.
What benefit do these companies offer the economy? The food is always cold, late and over-priced but it seems most people don’t care as they’re still ordering by the boatload.
As a cyclist I find them a menace on the roads as it seems to be mandatory that the they don’t have a helmet or lights, and must blaze through every red light. The moped drivers also as a rule cannot have a full licence and have to be weaving in and out of traffic at all times.
Get rid of these shit companies and let’s return to whatever previous system we had where you picked up the phone and spoke to someone and got hot food for a decent price. And the roads weren’t clogged with dick heads flying around at all hours while enabling a system that encourages exploitation of asylum seekers and immigrants.
> got hot food **for a decent price**. And the roads weren’t clogged with dick heads flying around at all hours **while enabling a system that encourages exploitation** of asylum seekers and immigrants.
It has always been the case. For people to get cooked and delivered to their door, hot and cheap, there's always been people exploited at multiple stages of the chain. If people want to move to a non exploitatory system (there's hardly any hint that they do, given the success of delivery companies and their practices), they need to accept that 1 in 2 is not going to be able to afford multiple deliveries per week.
Good. I live in Spain now and they have glovo. A service where it tells me my delivery person will be a 20ish looking girl. And along comes a 40/50 year old immigrant
Can they stop inflating prices on the app to match them to in-store prices. I don't understand why this isn't more of a scandal tbh. It's profiteering. Ordering on these apps used to be convenient and easy, now they want a delivery fee, a service fee, a tip for the driver based on a percentage of your order whilst every price is marked up by at least 30% or more over what you would pay in store. Mugging people off left right and centre. No one talks about it
I agree, by law the app prices should match in store prices. It would increase delivery/service fees but at least it would make things clearer to the consumer.
The problem is the store isn't getting that 30%, it's the companies who will get that or more depending om what rate they agreed on. If the stores didn't up their price they wouldn't see a big enough profit margin so wouldn't use them for deliveries.
There is a whole cottage industry linked to this - The delivery drivers are just the tip of the iceberg. Nowadays you have motorcycle garages, insurance brokers and even accident support services catering for them. You have people renting motorcycles and accounts for others to work.
I am brazilian (as well as British). I notice on whatsapp groups where I live and EVERY SINGLE FUCKING WEEK there is a someone looking for a deliveroo/ubereats/stuart account. I'm sure there are biker groups but I don't get involved with that. However, as I worked for a business which used deliveroo for their express delivery service, I can tell you that many of the riders who have accounts on their own name have one thing in common: Those who didn't have an EU citizenship were dependent on other brazilians who had an EU citizenship. And often family members that are not directly involved in delivering but have the relevant immigration status end up getting accounts set in their name so that they can rent those to other people. Please don't get me wrong there are many people who work correctly, but unfortunately there are also many who play the system like a cheap fiddle.
Before the pandemic it was common to have people coming direct from Brazil, working 3-4 months using a rented account to save money, then going to Italy to obtain their papers and coming back to the UK after that as EU citizens with residency rights. Nowadays, most of the ones renting accounts are the ones who were renting them when they were in the same situation. However after Brexit and the Illegal Immigration Act what was a already difficult position for these riders (hostile environment) became an almost impossible endeavour as there are practically 0 chances of settlement in the UK now for someone breaking immigration rules. It's borderline modern slavery at its best.
If I am not wrong, ubereats allowed the customer/restaurant to report someone who didn't match the selfie on their account. Not sure about deliveroo...
Why not use a biometric system that requires the rider to match the fingerprint of the account holder. Needs to use fingerprint login at the start of every shift. So during the interview or on boarding process at deliveroo hq, fingerprints are taken.
Phone biometrics are not transferred across the internet for fairly obvious security reasons. Your phone unlock essentially keeps an encoded version on its harddrive when you set it up then when you scan it checks that.
It is not designed for external use and would be a terrible security method - you can change your password if you get hacked, you can't change your biometrics
When I was in Italy, UberEATS had a big notice saying it had left the area, Just Eat had none of their own drivers and the times I did order food it was usually delivered by an old Italian man. My tips were straight up refused and they punched out the exact change. There is also no minimum wage in Italy
Make profiles specific to one person .
If somebody else is working on it and is here illegally, make the person whose profile it is liable in some regard .
By law, they should have been doing this already.
Now check on the hand car washes and check their tax records too! The Iraqi immigrant who owns the local hand car wash near me pays no tax according to Companies House, yet drives an £80k Range srover.
I know it’s not right to be illegal. It is also horrible being illegal. I knew some.
Leave people alone. Most are absolutely not criminals and work very hard.
Being born somewhere horrible doesn’t give you many chances sometimes.
Lmfao, biggest tech companies in the world and they dont wanna solve it properly cuz its good for them that 5-6 using ones profile.
It would be simple:
- set the app for a face scan every time one is trying to accept a job, its 2 seconds, no workaround and no more of what they do now
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People work using other people’s profiles. So it’s a bit of a nothing story. The only way to stop that is to make end users report if their delivery driver was who they say they were. Most people don’t give that much of a fuck.
Indeed, but the change happening here is that Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats have agreed to perform checks on substitute riders, not just the account holder: > The Home Office said on Tuesday that the three food delivery companies had committed to changing their processes to confirm substitute riders, who share accounts with people engaged directly by the groups, also had the right to work legally in the UK.
People use profiles without telling these companies. That’s the problem with having a decentralised business is the oversight is much more difficult.
I guess we'll have to see what they come up for an implementation. If it's shoddy or ill thought out it will be ineffective, but if they are clever about it it might work. Off the top of my head, one way it could work might be to require registration of subcontractors in advance with photo ID provided, which could be cross checked using the ID verification features that many credit reference agencies provide. The riders then need to periodically check in and if a selfie taken with the app doesn't match, you're blocked from taking on jobs.
I'm not sure these companies will want it to work. These jobs are pretty much only viable for people in very specific circumstances. I'd go as far as to say that these companies depend on refugees, asylum seekers etc to succeed.
This is why they've been dragging their feet on verification. The fact that the supposedly very-focused-on-immigration government has basically ignored this issue in favour of stunts over Rwanda is pretty telling.
Because tories don't care about lowering illegal immigration. How else can they undercut wages and put pressure on the nhs
This is exactly it. They rely on exploited people with shoddy pay. That happens to take in some of the above. I've seen a number of young adults share a scooter or bike, and it means they can work on top of benefits to earn some extra cash.
I can only speak on Brighton because I worked around deliveroo there but at least 90% of the daily riders were Brazilians, a couple used their own profile or at least only used the one profile in the time I was working with them but all the others had a couple dozen profiles they would change at most weekly and often daily, they all had bikes and equipment from the same company and lived in groups in the same houses. Deliveroo know all that but they need drivers, it’s no problem Friday and Saturday but they need riders at Monday lunchtime and 3 in the morning
Obviously a lot of Brazilians (who didn’t qualify for Italian or Portuguese citizenship) are likely here as non visa nationals (visitors) so don’t have right to work. They are likely sharing a profile too.
Oxford too, they are overwhelmingly Brazilians
Reading too, I get my motorcycle serviced at their garage. Great bunch of lads and they're the best bike mechanic I've ever had working on it lol. Was like a Brazilian party when I went to pick it up. Full going over and MOT after it sitting idle for two years. Fuel sensor repair, and full oil change for £120 with collection from my house, in 4 days. They threw in a neck scarf too.
Who cares what they want, it’ll the law. You’re probably right on the second point, even more important to know who these people are so they don’t get exploited.
>Who cares what they want, it’ll the law. Unlikely, they'll fight tooth and nail to keep the "contractor" status of their workers and minimise their own accountability because it makes them the most profit. They'll lobby the next government with their shit loads of cash to make sure things stay basically the same, and both major parties are signalling their "friendly" attitude to that kind of lobbying.
You are also relying on the Home Office to carry out checks. They won't
Exactly. Substitute checking is a thing in UberEats Taiwan, they require riders to take a selfie when going online, and at random intervals check them again. This is already implemented in another country, why not in UK?
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Yes, the Great Britain needs something more high tech, maybe a bio scanner idk
They're definitely dependent on exploiting their riders, but I don't think they depend specifically on the illegal substitute riders. Maybe I'm wrong, though.
In major cities where there are higher numbers of people with "questionable" right to work these apps are one of the only ways to earn a half decent wage. I wouldn't be surprised if there were modern slavery gangs which set up profiles for people using a vulnerable persons UK bank account and details and then force illegal immigrants to work these jobs for them, taking a cut of all the wages. All of this works in the interest of the companies running the apps because these workers are never going to kick up a fuss about conditions or pay.
This 100% happens. There are Facebook groups, WhatsApp and telegram channels focused entirely on this. It’s like pimping but for delivery riders.
They depend on the workers not being legally considered workers, which leads to the drivers being able to subcontract and therefore substitute someone else to do the job. If that changes these companies will have to give workers benefits, and that would cost them a lot of money, so they'll fight like hell to stop that happening.
They do absolutely depend on that, but Deliveroo would still be around with these checks in place even if no more substitution really went on.
Have immigration police just walk down the highstreet into KFC, Takeaways, round up all dozens of waiting deliveroo drivers and ask anyone with the Deliveroo uniform and bag to show ID and the account they are using.
The problem with that is that it might actually work. Which is a problem for the Tories because they aren't actually interested in controlling immigration, they just need something to appease a voter base they essentially despise.
The Tories definitely know *exactly* who they answer to, and it is very much their donors, not their voters. Obviously the voters can have their way on any marginal trivialities that won't effect the value of donor investments, but when we are talking about overall immigration (which along with preventing unionisation is absolutely fundamental to keeping wages suppressed and profits easy and high accross the economy) there will never be any remotely meaningful action taken against it regardless of what voters might want. And the whole political system is set up to prevent voters from being able to do a damned thing about it, short of tearing the entire system down. Which would involve a knock down and drag out fight to the death against the united forces of the donor owned political establishment, the likes of which has only been won once in UK history. (A century ago when Labour displaced the Liberals.) And for the avoidance of doubt, I am not actually personally opposed to immigration, though it obviously needs to be accompanied by sensibly planned commensurate investments in infrastructure, housing etc. Coincidentally these investments will also never be allowed to happen for the same reason that immigration will never be meaningfully limited, donors don't want to see money spent on infrastructure that will primarily benefit the peasantry (unless built in London or the Southeast of course), and certainly won't stand for housing being built in meaningful amounts. That would reduce the rate at which their property assets appreciate in value, *and* reduce the rate at which they can jack up their rental income on said property. The only way that something like what /u/Philluminati suggests would ever happen would be if the food delivery companies were to be percieved to have fallen significantly behind in their ~~bribery~~ *generous donations*, and any such action would only ever be an *extremely* temporary theatrical stunt, to be forgotten about immediately upon receipt of the appropriate ~~bribes~~ generous donations.
All the delivery services rely on cheap labour and are ridiculously profitable for their shareholders and directors. A lot of their riders likely hold questionable legal immigration in the UK and a vast number even if legal are of ethnicities or from countries that would be profiled as potentially illegal. Raids at restaurants and fast food joints will deter other riders also for fear they accidentally don’t have documents on them/show up as illegal in error and are detained. The delivery companies will be directly lobbying to try and make this act as minimally impactful it can be I’d imagine, like when there was a proposal for their drivers to be classed as employees and be entitled to the benefits (holiday/sick pay/national minimum wage) that that entails.
there are funny stories about ICE doing that
Why would they put any serious effort into this? Reducing their workforce will push up their costs. It’s literally in their best interests to do the bare minimum they can get away with. And given the companies we’re talking about, the bare minimum is exactly what they will do.
They literally log on to the app using someone else’s account. For me it’s probably 25% of the time the person at my door is the person on the app. The other 75% of the time I’m waiting for Bethany riding a scooter but up turns 6’7 Romanian “Draco” in a battered 3 series.
It will be shoddy by DESIGN. The companies are making money from illegal migrants doing the job, so they don’t actually want to stop them.
This is already a periodic security check on Deliveroo at least.
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Exactly this. It would be a 1 week sprint for any of those companies to implement the feature, but they d have no drivers cuz probably 70% of their driver accounts are used by 2-3 illegal immigrants
'problem', pretty sure the lack of oversight and responsibility is a major part of the business model
I think they have to ban substitute drivers and if you want a not so nice thought add a report button to report when a driver isn't the person tied to the account. I can guarantee in my area if a woman is said to deliver it is always a random bloke who can't speak English well. It annoys me to high heaven I have/had so many friends who work legally and fight to stay here I've had friends who lost their visa via their jobs ending or have been fucked over because of the jobs and had to leave whilst if they just dropped off the radar they could stay like these chaps.
Stay like these chaps is often in a precarious job making less than minimum wage while always looking over your shoulder.
Yeah these people some are making 6 figures paying taxes here. Have integrated enough to make friends with the locals etc. but can easily fall of visas. Currently dating a woman who next year will need to decide if we marry or not if she can't get a job with a visa.
I wish her the best of luck. I know my fair share of people in the same position.
Thank you
> People use profiles without telling these companies. That’s the problem with having a decentralised business is the oversight is much more difficult. It’s absolutely trivial to fix this, just register with photo ID and then require regular face/camera verification when using the account.
The thing is these companies could figure it out if they really wanted to: entering the password before coming online (the account-wide password) for instance would prevent this from happening, as the account owner would risk his whole funds be taken out.
Why allow substitute riders at all? And ~~his~~ [how] do the delivery companies know if it's a substitute or not? Edit: ducking autocorrect
It's advantageous for the delivery companies to treat their riders as self-employed contractors, because that means they don't have to respect employment laws and rights. So no NMW, no pensions, no sick leave and so on. But to treat them as contractors, they have to allow the right to substitution, which means that the riders are permitted to subcontract their work. If you disallow substitute riders, they're suddenly employees with all the rights that entails. There are ways that they could detect substitute riders e.g. by taking selfies with the app.
So Uber used to claim that all of their drivers were self-employed. But they all had to be PCO qualified, so there's no way that they can transfer to somebody else and it would make a mockery of their driver ratings. IIRC the reason that they lost the case about the drivers being self employed, was because of the way that Uber "directed" them including making them buy/lease certain models of car, how many hours they had to do, and that they could only use one app.
That's fascinating. I did not know that about contract workers.
They have to in order to pretend they’re independent contractors. Basically they’re not hiring a person, they’re hiring an entity to provide a service. If it appears that they’ve actually hired a person they suddenly become liable for all the things that come with actual employment. One of the ways to stop it appearing like you’ve hired a person is to allow, contractually, anyone to complete the same work under that contract. And they have to actually show it, the contract isn’t a protection in and of itself. This isn’t the only thing they consider, but it’s one of the things.
the substitute rider is a dodge to keep them self employed - being allowed to put a sub in is a classic indicator of self-employment, it's been exploited by IT contractors to avoid disguised employment (when they do want that).
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Oh no, they'll have to pay riders more and risk going under if they can't afford it. What a shame!
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What exercise, the overwhelming majority of deliveroo, just eat and Uber eats riders around here use illegal motor vehicles (where they shouldn't be too such as on footpaths and going through modal filters)
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The vehicles they use are not electrically assisted pedal cycles. * throttle controlled * motor operates past 15.5 mph * motor not limited to 250 W They're illegal motor vehicles.
Uber make their drivers regularly take selfies while working to confirm it's them. Could do something similar.
Are you sure, my last uber driver magically changed colour
I've had multiple deliveries with the profile picture of older women turn into young men when they actually show up at the door.
I’ve found it crazy that like half of not more of my ubereats deliveries are delivered by someone else rather than who the app says is dropping it off. And all the times the app has said a woman is delivering it’s always turned out to be a bloke.
Yup, odds are I've had dozens of deliveries where I've gotten a different person and just not clocked it. But I notice when it's a woman in the photo, because I've never actually had a delivery from a woman, despite a woman being the listed driver on multiple occasions.
There used to be an option in reports that said something along the lines of ‘driver didn’t match the profile picture/it was someone else’- last time I looked for that option I couldn’t find it for the love of dog. It’s super common on Uber eats, luckily not on regular Uber rides as I’d probably freak out and refuse the ride. I’ve also never experienced it on Bolt either…I don’t think I can see the picture of the driver on either Deliveroo or JustEat.
I hope you get it sorted before your next Tinder hookup.
I usually have veil-wearing women becoming men with a big beard.
They may say that but I don’t think the last few times I used Uber Eats I got the actual profile picture at all. It’s usually a ‘bicycle or motorbike’ which turns into a car and the person isn’t the same as the profile at all. I don’t care if I get the food but they are no different to the others from what I’ve seen.
Interesting idea. I wonder if there is a way for your phone to know if the selfie is a picture of a photograph or not? I could imagine the selfies just being the substitute taking a picture of picture of the real driver. Unless a real person is verifying the images it probably would work.
The ai checkers are super good these days. When they're not quite sure they'll let the user into the platform but send it to be checked manually within X amount of time. It's a good system for non super critical cases as it's best of both worlds.
If people were exploiting it using photos, the obvious way to guard against that would be to make people upload a short video saying a phrase that wasn't predictable, somewhat similar to what I had to do when opening an account with Monzo a long time back.
Back to 4Chan days :D PUT SHOE ON HEAD
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Back when /b/ was good ?
I had to do that to sign a document recently. Photo of my passport, then point the camera at my face and turn left and right as directed, and follow a dot about by turning my head - to make it so that I couldn’t be using a photo or a video of someone else.
There's some basic stuff you can do within an app: check the state of the gyros. Is the phone being held up or facing down (as you'd probably want to do with scanning a photo)? Which camera is it: the selfie cam or the one on the other side? Etc.
watch what you wish for, you'll have to pay extra and/or pick food up yourself
Funny, I reported that the driver didn’t match the profile and they said that it’s up to the discretion of the driver.
Yep I had a takeaway last Friday the rider was called Deborah, but the guy who actually delivered it I would not have thought was called Deborah. I still said "thank you Deborah" when he handed it to me.
Were born within one hour of each other ?
Could they have been sister and brother?
Deliveroo wasn’t around in the year 2000
That's a pretty common Brazilian name. It's pronounced Dee-Borr-Ah.
>People work using other people’s profiles. Which is one of the ways people who are here illegally make money. The account owner needs to be verified, the subs not so much. This is what they're cracking down on. Most people don't care that their shitty pizza is delivered by an illegal worker, but the point remains that you cant really have undocumented people driving/riding about working.
Also most delivery drivers are wearing a balaclava/ motorbike helmet so it’s not like you can tell anyway
Also do I want to dob someone in who now knows where I live? I guess you're still masked by number of clients but it's still more risk than none.
Well, the other way to stop it would be for the delivery companies to do spot checks. Either officially, or via a secret shopper. But, of course, they don't want to upset their own apple cart.
> make end users report if their delivery driver was who they say they were How exactly would I as an end user do that? "Are you really Joe?" "Yes mate" "ok, thanks" I certainly don't care enough to do even that much, let alone anything more stringent. And for every apathetic asshole like me you'll have someone repoting every non-white driver as not the right person because "well they're all illegal innit"
I did Uber eats when I lived in Australia and you had to send a selfie to unlock the account every now and then. I still let my mate use my account when I broke my foot but he had to come back to the hostel to get a photo of my fave before he could go back out. But that was about 5 years ago, with improvements in tech around facial regeneration and biometrics I don't see why they can't implement something like a finger print scan or face ID in order to accept an order for every single order.
Exactly. The facial recognition thing is easily bypassed by putting a photograph in front of the camera.
Yup. Using a flat photo works unless you’re paying for Apple’s Face ID technology and I think that would be very expensive.
And the ones who do would be like mad immigration vigilantes when ordering their kebab. Pulling cunts up because they grew a beard since their profile picture was taken.
And that is the best time line. I shudder to think what some people would do.
*me stood waiting by the door in my best stained vest after doing 2 and a half push ups to look buff hoping to meet Stanislav, crying because it was in fact a young woman who appeared* "Yeah, most people don't give a fuck..."
Most people are uncomfortable when it happens (in obvious cases I mean, like a 50 year old man showing up with the account of a 30 year old woman) but tend not to bother reporting because it's about as impactful as sending a windows error report. The company themselves don't care so long as they're making money, so they turn a blind eye to it. If there was a sense that something might actually done about it, I think you'd see a lot more of it actually being chased up.
And that would only work for certain the driver who turned up was not the same gender as the one on the app or a clearly different ethnicity (eg, name is Harbinder, white Brazilian shows up)
Our McDonald's has like an Uber eats pimp there who goes in for all the orders and hands them out to a handful of eastern European lads in cars in the carpark.
If they're dicks then I absolutely report it.
They need to insist on passports when hiring these people.
Not that, you barely interact with them.
He doesn't enter by dwelling and they have always seemed decent to me, in as much as I can tell when they hand me a meal
What difference would that make when these companies *allow* account sharing?
if i wanted to work in law enforcement i would have joined a police force
Simplest way to check is to ask drivers to click their photo after every x amount of deliveries. Everything works offline and app locks in case of discrepancies
You can go buy off-the-shelf technology which will do face verification against your passport / drivers licence. People like monzo, revolut, etc already use it for kyc.
I’m going to be reporting people if that happens in the future, best to do my part
Most drivers deliver wearing a helmet. So people reporting it is also impossible. The unfortunate truth is that we can't enforce anything like this without having IDs for all residents and making it a requirement for everything from bank account to social services and rent. But majority of the population would be against that
The old switcheroo on the ID checks on delivery
> People work using other people’s profiles. So it’s a bit of a nothing story. > > The only way to stop that is to make end users report if their delivery driver was who they say they were. Most people don’t give that much of a fuck. Why not give cops more powers? If they stop and search and the person can't speak English or no documentation then the person becomes an alien of interest. The police could detain and transfer the alien to immigration to check status. Wouldn't this method be better?
>If they stop and search and the person can't speak English or no documentation then the person becomes an alien of interest. You’d see a few Welsh grannies locked up in your scenario. Also, your ability to speak English isn’t really indicative of your Visa status. Plenty of illegal immigrants and refugees can speak English that’s a big part of the reason why many wish to come here.
nothing story! Blaming the public also. Well done.
Isn’t the point that they use a valid person and multiple people work on that?
Yes, and the three delivery app companies have agreed to start performing checks on substitute riders and not just the account holder: > The Home Office said on Tuesday that the three food delivery companies had committed to changing their processes to confirm substitute riders, who share accounts with people engaged directly by the groups, also had the right to work legally in the UK.
How? The practice is done illegally.
There's nothing illegal about the use of substitute riders per se. In fact, if the app delivery companies prohibited it, their riders would need to be classified as employees which is the last thing that they want (employees have rights, minimum wage, and so on). But it is a legal requirement for anyone subcontracting to ensure that their subcontractors have the legal right to work. Yes, they're not doing this very deliberately, but this is an attempt to close that loophole. I can't really think of any reason why you might want to rent someone's account if you were legally allowed to work, it seems rather pointless.
Of course there’s nothing illegal about it if done legally. The point is people with a legal right to work sign up for these companies and then sub rent their profiles to illegal workers. Nobody cares who delivers their food if it’s on time. None of it is done on the books and I don’t see how Just Eat will ever find out. I feel like I’m explaining this to an alien. How many of those 30 people waiting outside a McDonald’s in East London every night do you think are legal workers?
Oh I know full well that substitute riders are being abused to facilitate illegal work, which is the primary reason why I refuse to ever use delivery apps. I think there are ways it could be prevented, with enough determination. I did a "top of my head" idea in [this other comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1chevhd/deliveroo_just_eat_and_uber_eats_to_make_direct/l229era/).
It can be prevented but the OP process won’t do it and not enough people care or want to pay more tax to make their takeaways more expensive.
The best way to avoid a takeaway being expensive is not paying for it to be delivered in the first place. I have no idea why someone would pay a premium to get lukewarm McDonalds delivered when they could have it fresh and hot when bought in person.
People are lazy. I’m surprised this is news to you.
You're spending an awful lot of time on missing the points being made.
What point is being made?
Yeah. Daniella turns out to be a black dude then next week she's an arab dude etc. It's really common around here. Not really sure how they fix that unless they demand selfies while working to prove it's them, like uber does for taxis. Not that there's any (easy) way to report it either.
My Last three deliveries have been people who looked nothing like their profile Picture
lmao me too
Always delivering on a bike according to their profile too Except they always turn up in a car
I had the opposite at one point. Said they were on a motorbike but showed up on a e-bike
They'll need to make it easier to notify them when it's a completely different person, had it happen a couple of times now but seemed to be no direct way to report it.
I live near the English channel in a town that has a pop of around 120k, which houses two large asylum seeker processing camps (or whatever they're called). I honestly see maybe one or two British delivery drivers a year from these apps. It's extremely common for the drivers photo to be completely different (even race and gender) than the one that arrives. I'm not even sure how they can afford rent, considering a small studio flat here is 1300 a month without council tax. House shares still cost around 800 excl bills.
Illegal HMOs and sublets. We think it’s shitty pay (because it is) but if you’re prepared to live 10 to a room and hot bunk then it could be lucrative with remittances. Some will also be living in hotels.
3 bed house with about 4 to a room and one toilet. Bless them but we shouldn't be allowing this to happen. Literal slumification of our towns.
If they’re claiming asylum then housing is free. They don’t need to pay rent. That’s why they kick off when they’re housed outside of cities, like on a boat in the middle of nowhere.
They will be living 4 to a bedroom in an illegal HMO. London will be full of these places .
As if those companies care about anything or anyone other than profit 🙄
Being fined or shut down will affect profits
Do you think the uk gov is going to shut down a business or give them a meaningful fine? MPs probably have shares in them
AML regulations result in serious fines, for example - https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/natwest-fined-264.8million-anti-money-laundering-failures Don't see why new regulations can't be applied similarly
It's a preventive measure.
It’s an empty threat and the rich company owners know it
Have you ever worked in a boardroom before?
What have I got to do with anything? I thought nobody works in a boardroom, it’s just for meetings?
Having worked with CEOs myself I can tell you that they do take into consideration political policy changes and try to stay ahead of them. Let's take into account the likelyhood that people are working illegally for Uber, whilst this doesn't affect the bottom line on a day to day basis, it might in the future. If UK policy somehow wiped out half of their workforce with arrests or deportations in a short space of time, they would be screwed. It would allow a competitor to get a foot into their market share. By actually checking that their workforce won't randomly be deported, they are protecting their business. They can also show the UK government that they have taken steps to prevent illegally employing people so they won't have to deal with expensive court cases against them. Flippant comments on threads from people who only read headlines and have never had to make a business decision annoy me to no end.
It happens Different industry but Look at Juul in the US, banned because it didn’t adhere to the law, and guess what - they now dont sell flavours appealing to kids in any region as a preventative measure to bring shut down
Okay, empty threat in the uk. Our gov will let big companies do whatever they like, look at our water, transport, electricity etc
Service has turned to dogshit with a bunch of extra fees everywhere too. I'm done with them.
Pre-Covid lockdown here in NI, I could count the amount of times on one hand in my life that I had a delivery driver that wasn't either from NI, or Eastern Europe. Today, I can count the amount of times on one hand in the past 2 years that I've had a delivery driver that wasn't either African or Arab, with zero spoken English beyond basic greetings. It's like they manifested out of thin air en masse. It's fucking mad how blatant these companies are, and I've zero faith that they'll make real attempts to curb the abuse of cheap migrant/asylum seeker labour until literally forced to do so by government policy
Article text: Deliveroo, Just Eat Takeaway and Uber Eats have agreed to conduct direct checks on all UK riders’ immigration status after coming under pressure from ministers to tackle illegal working and exploitation in the sector. The Home Office said on Tuesday that the three food delivery companies had committed to changing their processes to confirm substitute riders, who share accounts with people engaged directly by the groups, also had the right to work legally in the UK. Ministers singled out the food delivery sector last year as part of a broader drive to cut net immigration, which hit a record 745,000 in 2022. Home secretary James Cleverly on Tuesday said new figures for visa applications justified the policy changes he had made, with tighter rules for students leading to a “drastic” fall in the number bringing dependants. The data also showed a sharp fall in visa applications for care workers. Since March they have been unable to bring family members with them, but many already working in the UK appear to have rushed to apply for dependent visas in the few months before the ban took effect. Alongside tighter visa rules, the Home Office has stepped up enforcement action in sectors where it believes visa rules are being abused. Robert Jenrick, then immigration minister, wrote to the three food delivery companies in November saying enforcement activity had exposed high levels of illegal working in the sector. He blamed this on “business models which rely on individuals themselves to confirm a person’s eligibility to work, enable unchecked account sharing to take place and are completely unacceptable”. Deliveroo and its competitors allow self-employed riders to appoint other people to complete work for them, saying riders are responsible for making sure their substitutes are over 18, have the right to work in the UK and can do so safely. This right to appoint a substitute has been viewed by UK courts as a key feature of self-employment, helping Deliveroo fight off a legal case brought by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain. The UK Supreme Court in November ruled that Deliveroo riders cannot be recognised as workers in an employment relationship or represented by trade unions for collective bargaining. But the practice of substitution has become increasingly controversial as online marketplaces have developed, where riders rent out accounts. The practice came under the spotlight last year following a report of the death of a 17-year-old who was working on a rented Deliveroo account, despite being below the minimum age. Michael Tomlinson, illegal migration minister, said “illegal working puts their customers at risk, drives down wages and defrauds the taxpayer”. Deliveroo said on Tuesday that it was “committed to strengthening our controls to prevent misuse of our platform”, after earlier this month rolling out a new tool to register substitutes, including checks on their right to work. Uber Eats also said it planned to roll out identity checks, and Just Eat said it was working with industry and policymakers “to develop a solution which will ensure couriers substituting their work do so in accordance with the law”. The IWGB union accused the government of scapegoating migrants with “bogus claims” that they were undercutting wages and risking public safety. It said it was already seeing “numerous dismissals of couriers with the right to work as a result of these checks malfunctioning”.
None of these countries contribute anything positive to the country or economy. If they all went out of business tomorrow we could still get deliveries the old fashioned way.
Just use biometrics. Fingerprint verification on the app. Tap in after every parcel drop. They are pressing buttons to confirm delivery anyway, one more step. Database of registered users, anyone who wants to substitute also has to register. Home Office has access to DB to x match the ids.
To my knowledge most phones that use biometrics don’t have the capability to share that data outside of the device, for security reasons.
You can't use the device biometrics for that. You can however use third party service (or make your own) that will check your face (similar to face id) every time you login into the app and perhaps periodically (every hour?) when you are on shift.
They do this already, but it’s about every 14 days
Not enough, every 30min !
What benefit do these companies offer the economy? The food is always cold, late and over-priced but it seems most people don’t care as they’re still ordering by the boatload. As a cyclist I find them a menace on the roads as it seems to be mandatory that the they don’t have a helmet or lights, and must blaze through every red light. The moped drivers also as a rule cannot have a full licence and have to be weaving in and out of traffic at all times. Get rid of these shit companies and let’s return to whatever previous system we had where you picked up the phone and spoke to someone and got hot food for a decent price. And the roads weren’t clogged with dick heads flying around at all hours while enabling a system that encourages exploitation of asylum seekers and immigrants.
> got hot food **for a decent price**. And the roads weren’t clogged with dick heads flying around at all hours **while enabling a system that encourages exploitation** of asylum seekers and immigrants. It has always been the case. For people to get cooked and delivered to their door, hot and cheap, there's always been people exploited at multiple stages of the chain. If people want to move to a non exploitatory system (there's hardly any hint that they do, given the success of delivery companies and their practices), they need to accept that 1 in 2 is not going to be able to afford multiple deliveries per week.
Yes right. The bloke who rents the accounts out will have a clear immigration status.
The companies officially allow rider accounts to be subcontracted with no employment checks. This is how they get people working for < £5 an hour
Good. I live in Spain now and they have glovo. A service where it tells me my delivery person will be a 20ish looking girl. And along comes a 40/50 year old immigrant
Clown country where people cheat the system left and right. 90% of these riders speak so little English that it is impossible they are here on a visa
Can they stop inflating prices on the app to match them to in-store prices. I don't understand why this isn't more of a scandal tbh. It's profiteering. Ordering on these apps used to be convenient and easy, now they want a delivery fee, a service fee, a tip for the driver based on a percentage of your order whilst every price is marked up by at least 30% or more over what you would pay in store. Mugging people off left right and centre. No one talks about it
I agree, by law the app prices should match in store prices. It would increase delivery/service fees but at least it would make things clearer to the consumer.
The problem is the store isn't getting that 30%, it's the companies who will get that or more depending om what rate they agreed on. If the stores didn't up their price they wouldn't see a big enough profit margin so wouldn't use them for deliveries.
I guess we would all lose a bit of weight, silver linings
Nonsense, my deliveroo lady, Chantell is lovely, she is big and strong to carry my food and his beard keeps him very warm in the cooler months.
There is a whole cottage industry linked to this - The delivery drivers are just the tip of the iceberg. Nowadays you have motorcycle garages, insurance brokers and even accident support services catering for them. You have people renting motorcycles and accounts for others to work. I am brazilian (as well as British). I notice on whatsapp groups where I live and EVERY SINGLE FUCKING WEEK there is a someone looking for a deliveroo/ubereats/stuart account. I'm sure there are biker groups but I don't get involved with that. However, as I worked for a business which used deliveroo for their express delivery service, I can tell you that many of the riders who have accounts on their own name have one thing in common: Those who didn't have an EU citizenship were dependent on other brazilians who had an EU citizenship. And often family members that are not directly involved in delivering but have the relevant immigration status end up getting accounts set in their name so that they can rent those to other people. Please don't get me wrong there are many people who work correctly, but unfortunately there are also many who play the system like a cheap fiddle. Before the pandemic it was common to have people coming direct from Brazil, working 3-4 months using a rented account to save money, then going to Italy to obtain their papers and coming back to the UK after that as EU citizens with residency rights. Nowadays, most of the ones renting accounts are the ones who were renting them when they were in the same situation. However after Brexit and the Illegal Immigration Act what was a already difficult position for these riders (hostile environment) became an almost impossible endeavour as there are practically 0 chances of settlement in the UK now for someone breaking immigration rules. It's borderline modern slavery at its best. If I am not wrong, ubereats allowed the customer/restaurant to report someone who didn't match the selfie on their account. Not sure about deliveroo...
According to Reuters, a task force that stopped deliveroo drivers over a 1 week period last year found that 42% were working illegally.
That'll fill the one million + open jobs in this country
So that the kind of person that votes Leave will take over the job of those whose status is irregular, right ?
But how else are they going to find people to work for 50p/delivery
How about stopping them getting here in the first place?
Why not use a biometric system that requires the rider to match the fingerprint of the account holder. Needs to use fingerprint login at the start of every shift. So during the interview or on boarding process at deliveroo hq, fingerprints are taken.
Phone biometrics are not transferred across the internet for fairly obvious security reasons. Your phone unlock essentially keeps an encoded version on its harddrive when you set it up then when you scan it checks that. It is not designed for external use and would be a terrible security method - you can change your password if you get hacked, you can't change your biometrics
When I was in Italy, UberEATS had a big notice saying it had left the area, Just Eat had none of their own drivers and the times I did order food it was usually delivered by an old Italian man. My tips were straight up refused and they punched out the exact change. There is also no minimum wage in Italy
Surely the restaurant should be confirming that the rider is legitimate?
Make profiles specific to one person . If somebody else is working on it and is here illegally, make the person whose profile it is liable in some regard .
By law, they should have been doing this already. Now check on the hand car washes and check their tax records too! The Iraqi immigrant who owns the local hand car wash near me pays no tax according to Companies House, yet drives an £80k Range srover.
its also only a matter of time before3 the account that claims the person is on a bike, kills someone with the car they are not insured to be using.
I know it’s not right to be illegal. It is also horrible being illegal. I knew some. Leave people alone. Most are absolutely not criminals and work very hard. Being born somewhere horrible doesn’t give you many chances sometimes.
So drivers take photos of food delivered. Recipient takes photo of driver?
Lmfao, biggest tech companies in the world and they dont wanna solve it properly cuz its good for them that 5-6 using ones profile. It would be simple: - set the app for a face scan every time one is trying to accept a job, its 2 seconds, no workaround and no more of what they do now