This is quite interesting as regards the history of the gig economy, regulation and the employment status question. And, of course, the political dimension as regards Uber lobbying etc.
Trouble is, it maybe chunters on a bit if you know most of this already. And it constantly moves from Uber (in the 'taxi' sense) to Deliveroo without really delineating the difference properly in terms of regulation, in my opinion at least (in the sense of private hire regulation on the one hand, and the largely unregulated food delivery dimension on the other hand). Although at times (with regard to the employment status thing, most obviously) it is quite good as regards explaining the difference
And, predictably, in terms of the 'taxi' Uber per se, it doesn't state that the 'gig economy' is nothing particularly new in conceptual terms.
And, for the purposes of forums like this, there's far too much about the insider political and lobbying stuff, in my opinion at least. Not that it's unimportant, but too much detail.
(On the other hand, you can see from all this why the likes of Unite moaning about Uber lobbying. Of course, they're just moaning that Uber better at lobbying than Unite
And, for example, with Labour now in government, haven't Unite fallen out with the likes of Angela Rayner over the Birmingham bin strike, for example? You'd need a heart of stone not to laugh
)There are a couple of graphs and graphics in the original piece that aren't included below, and I don't think the article is paywalled.
But that stuff's probably far too much detail for anyone who even manages to wade through all of this
How the gig economy conquered Britain and stoked the migration crisis
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... he-migrat/
Uber and Deliveroo have transformed the UK, but concerns are growing that they attract illegal workers
It was past midnight by the time David and Samantha Cameron emerged from the Coral Room at Sexy Fish, later followed by George Osborne.
It was a bad night to avoid the paparazzi. On the same evening in late 2015, Girls Aloud stars Cheryl Tweedy, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh also dined at the A-list Mayfair restaurant.
The Sexy Fish soiree, hosted by well-connected politicos Steve Hilton and Rachel Whetstone as a “godparent’s dinner”, was initially viewed as just another high-status party.
Hilton, a former Downing Street aide, and Whetstone, a political adviser turned Silicon Valley communications executive, were well-known friends of Cameron and Osborne. The prime minister and chancellor’s powers were at their zenith, following a surprise majority election victory and before the following year’s Brexit referendum.
It was only later that the party would become a source of controversy. Years later, a leak of thousands of internal Uber emails suggested that Whetstone, then the head of policy and communications at the taxi-hailing app, had planned to approach Osborne about setting up a meeting as the company was battling Boris Johnson.
Transport for London – overseen by Johnson, the capital’s mayor at the time – had threatened to ban key aspects of the app under pressure from the capital’s powerful taxi lobby. Whetstone wanted Cameron and Osborne to help.
“It was the era of Dave and George v Boris,” says Mark MacGann, who ran Uber’s lobbying in Europe at the time.
Whetstone had told colleagues she would bring up the issue with Osborne. The next month, TfL dropped its plans to crack down on Uber, in a major victory for the company.
It is unclear if Whetstone did lobby Osborne. What is clear, though, is that the links between the gig economy and government during these years were extremely tight. Whetstone has said “she did not routinely ‘lobby’ … on behalf of Uber in private”.
As Cameron and Osborne were leaving Sexy Fish, the number of couriers on bicycles in brightly coloured jackets weaving around London had tailed off, but they were becoming an increasingly common sight.
Deliveroo, the takeaway app founded two years earlier, was doubling orders every three months. The company was revolutionising food delivery with a network of self-employed couriers that could pick up items from any restaurant, challenging the old world of paper menus and fumbling for change.
To their supporters, including Cameron and Osborne, the two companies represented a new, better way of doing things in a digital world. The on-demand economy, enabled by smartphones and algorithms, was hacking away at the red tape that had held Britain back.
But to detractors, the employment models popularised by the likes of Uber, Deliveroo and an assortment of similar companies have frittered away workers’ rights and created an underclass of low-paid work, increasingly populated by migrant labour.
The gig economy, which rose to prominence in the coalition years, has come under fresh scrutiny in recent months.
Concerns are growing that the apps are allowing undocumented work and even encouraging illegal immigration to Britain with the promise of being able to earn money without checks.
Food delivery apps such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat have been at the centre of these claims. In May, a Telegraph investigation found that asylum seekers staying in Home Office hotels were regularly working as food delivery and grocery couriers, with one people smuggler saying: “All you need is a phone and a bike.” All the companies say they are taking steps to tackle illegal work.
To critics, this is the result of attempts to dodge responsibility for workers who use gig economy apps. Uber, Deliveroo and others spent years in Parliament and in court fighting attempts for their drivers and riders to be recognised as workers, a designation that entitled them to holiday pay and the minimum wage, and in some cases came with alternative tax arrangements.
Instead, drivers and riders were self-employed, paid by the delivery rather than by the hour. The companies presented drivers and couriers as a legion of micro-entrepreneurs, able to choose their own hours and be their own boss. Uber claimed the vast majority of its drivers worked part-time.
Deliveroo told a government-commissioned review into the gig economy that riders wanted flexibility. It portrayed the app as being populated by undergraduates and busy parents seeking to make some extra cash.
“The student with half an hour between classes can log on and earn some extra spending money,” the company said. It told a parliamentary committee that 85pc use the app as a “supplementary income stream”.
Yet two in five delivery workers stopped in random searches in 2023 were working illegally, according to statistics from the Home Office. The figures applied to all takeaway riders stopped, not any one app.
On Saturday, the Home Office said it had arrested 280 people as part of a week-long crackdown on illegal delivery work, after stopping 1,780 riders.
On social media, people constantly offer to rent out or sell accounts. One offered to set up an account for £160 using third-party documents, requiring only a name, phone number and email.
The exact scale of illegal work on the platforms is unknown, but it is enough to have seen Labour announce crackdowns on gig economy companies, including blocking anyone near an asylum hotel from seeking jobs through the apps and requiring extra checks.
The measures have been part of a wider attempt from Sir Keir Starmer’s Government to smash small boat gangs, which this week included the start of a “one in, one out” deal with France.
The coalition and Conservative governments of the mid-2010s did not have the same problems. While Cameron was not meeting his pledge to get net migration down to the tens of thousands, the number was running at less than half of today’s levels. Asylum claims were at 32,414 in 2015, against 108,138 last year. The highly visible small boats crossings would not start in large numbers for several years.
Deliveroo and its rivals are now reckoning with their role in the migrant crisis. How did it come to this?
‘It felt like a cabal’
Britain did not end up as a gig economy pioneer by accident. In 2014, Matt Hancock, who was Business Secretary at the time, commissioned a review of what was then called the “sharing economy”, with a brief to “make the UK a global centre”.
That year, asylum claims were at 24,914, and net migration stood at 260,000.
Reflecting the ambition to make the UK a global leader, Hancock recruited Debbie Wosskow, the boss of home-sharing website LoveHomeSwap, to author the review.
The report loosely called for a minimum wage for gig workers, but stated that a race to the bottom on pay and conditions “does not seem to be happening”. In a foreword, Hancock said: “The route to self-employment has never been easier.”
“There were very close relationships with some parts of the top ends of government,” says one lobbyist at a gig economy company. “There was a meeting of minds around low regulation, a shared belief that the consumer is getting a raw deal.”
Ministers were already welcoming of the gig economy, but the appointment of a string of Westminster insiders to key companies solidified the close relationship.
Whetstone had been political secretary to Michael Howard, Cameron’s predecessor as Conservative leader, before reinventing herself as a Silicon Valley communications executive. She spent a decade working for Google before joining Uber in 2015.
She had worked alongside Cameron when the future PM had worked in PR in the 1990s, and her husband, Hilton, had run strategy for the PM when he entered Downing Street.
Arranging a meeting between Osborne and Uber’s then boss Travis Kalanick was a key priority for Whetstone upon joining the company. The Chancellor was invited to a dinner at the house of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Omid Kordestani attended by Kalanick, and the two also met on the sidelines of Davos.
Shortly after the Conservatives’ election victory in 2015, Kalanick sent Osborne an email congratulating him on an “amazing result” and complaining about an impending crackdown from Johnson. (Later, Uber was asked to sign a business letter calling for Britain to stay in the EU. The company declined.)
Whetstone was far from the only link between the Conservatives and the gig economy. Adam Atashzai, one of Cameron’s advisers, worked in policy for Uber after leaving No10. He left after seven months and was succeeded by Naomi Gummer, who had worked for Jeremy Hunt. The company’s PR department included several former political advisers from both Labour and the Conservatives.
Deliveroo, which was founded in 2013, was cultivating links to government too. In 2017, Deliveroo hired Thea Rogers, the former BBC producer who had been credited with improving the former chancellor’s public image while in office. Osborne and Rogers married in 2023.
By now Cameron and Osborne had left office and Deliveroo was keen to cultivate links to the new administration. At Deliveroo, Rogers hired Hanbury Strategy, the lobbying firm founded by Cameron’s former aide Ameet Gill and the Brexiteer Paul Stephenson, as well as Vote Leave’s media head Robert Oxley, an adviser to Priti Patel and Michael Fallon who later became Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s press secretary.
“It absolutely felt like a cabal,” says one Westminster insider. “There was this genuine shared interest in low regulation and making the UK investable. But at the same time there was this uncomfortable closeness.”
Deliveroo said the company engages with all main political parties.
The model pioneered by Uber quickly caught on. In 2016, Amazon, which had traditionally employed delivery drivers, introduced a gig economy-type service known as Flex.
Battle in the courts
Whether it was a result of such close relationships or merely shared interests, the Cameron-Osborne governments championed gig economy companies. After TfL threatened to crack down on Uber in 2015, a Downing Street aide wrote to the body accusing them of “insane and Luddite things”, according to emails later leaked to the Guardian. Johnson himself said he had been “deluged” by correspondence from fellow Tories on the issue.
Ultimately, Cameron’s government did not pass any pro-gig economy legislation. But the welcoming approach and absence of new laws came as countries in Europe were applying stricter requirements and closely scrutinising tax arrangements. MacGann recalls contrasting the UK’s approach with France’s in an early meeting with Emmanuel Macron.
This cosy relationship ended almost as soon as Theresa May replaced Cameron in Downing Street. May took charge in the shadow of the Brexit vote and was more inclined to intervene. One of her chief aides was Nick Timothy, now a Conservative MP, who has repeatedly criticised the gig economy. “They just weren’t as biddable in the same way,” the lobbyist says.
At the time, asylum claims had risen slightly but immigration had rocketed up the agenda as a result of the Brexit referendum. Still, net migration was still relatively low and scrutiny of the gig economy focused on workers’ rights, rather than its ability to attract migrants to Britain.
Baroness Penn, who was May’s deputy chief of staff while she was prime minister, says the new government, with its attention on the “Jams” [those just about managing], was less convinced about the benefits of the gig economy.
“We definitely had a feeling that the relationship and obligations between employers and employees was changing or being disrupted, and that it was worth looking at that,” she says.
Within weeks of succeeding Cameron, May’s government commissioned a review carried out by Matthew Taylor, a former adviser to Sir Tony Blair.
In a sign of changing attitudes, Robert Halfon, a Conservative MP who served in May’s government, hit out at “Deliveroo Conservatism” in a column for Conservative Home.
“Focusing on opening up Deliveroo/Uber free markets to increase choice is irrelevant to millions of people who are struggling to pay their bus or train fare, let alone using Uber,” he wrote. “We must also not forget about these businesses’ work practices in terms of their employees.”
Osborne continued to champion the sector. He spent three years as editor of London’s Evening Standard and, during his stewardship of the paper, Westminster diarists frequently drew attention to the volley of friendly stories about Deliveroo giving out free lunches and feeding hungry children, as well as pro-Uber editorials (Osborne also worked part-time at BlackRock, an investor in Uber).
The Taylor review, billed as a way to address the insecurities of the gig economy, recommended that people making money on the apps should receive sick pay and holidays. But a promised employment bill to introduce them never surfaced and political energy was sapped by the battles over Brexit.
By now, gig economy apps had become fixtures in Britain’s cities. Most had a business model based on asking forgiveness later, rather than seeking permission in the first place.
Campaigners fought it out in the courts. In 2015, two Uber drivers, James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam, challenged the company in the Employment Tribunal, arguing that they were workers rather than self-employed, and thus entitled to the minimum wage.
The two won a shock victory, and Uber took the fight all the way to the Supreme Court, only to finally lose in 2021. The company was forced to overhaul its business model and set aside $600m (£450m) to cover the cost of historic claims.
As a result, Uber’s minicab business is now more regulated. But the legal arguments exposed in the case were instructive. Uber lost in part because drivers’ work was not able to be “substituted”, a practice in which someone who has accepted a job can appoint another person to do it on their behalf.
Substitution is a legal framework that lets contractors such as plumbers and electricians send someone else to do a job if they fall ill or have an emergency.
In 2017, shortly before a legal battle with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, Deliveroo inserted a substitution clause inside riders’ contracts. The case once again went all the way to the Supreme Court, but unlike Uber, Deliveroo prevailed. While a cab driver couldn’t sub in someone to drive their vehicle, a courier could get a ringer to deliver a meal to someone’s door.
Judges found that the ability to substitute workers, even if rarely deployed, was “totally inconsistent with… the existence of an employment relationship”.
The company says that substitution was just one reason why the court found that riders were classified as self-employed.
Route for migrants?
The use of substitutes has generated some uncomfortable headlines for Deliveroo. In 2022, a driver working as a substitute bit off a customer’s thumb. The following year a 17-year-old died while using a rented account and moped. But since substitutes are appointed by the rider rather than the company, takeaway apps are not legally responsible for them.
The clauses are now standard practice across the industry, used by Uber Eats, the company’s food delivery service, and Just Eat as well as Deliveroo.
Just Eat had once attempted to forge a different path by employing riders on regular shifts, with its chief executive Jitse Groen saying the gig economy created “precarious working conditions across Europe, the worst seen in a hundred years”. But the company relented in 2023, with food delivery businesses under investor pressure to turn a profit.
“There’s only one reason why it’s done [allowing substitution], and that is to exploit workers and to skirt employment law,” says Farrar, one of the drivers who had challenged Uber, and now runs campaign group Worker Info Exchange. The apps all say that substitution is a legitimate part of employment law.
The model employed by takeaway apps may have diminished their legal responsibilities. But critics say the embrace of substitution has made it far easier for illegal work on the platform.
It has made gig economy companies a lightning rod for criticism amid concerns that they are harbouring illegal work, following a surge in small boat crossings and soaring migration levels.
Between 2020 and 2024, annual boat crossings in the Channel have surged from 8,466 to 36,816, and asylum claims have climbed from 36,986 to 108,138.
Neither the companies nor the Government have published estimates of the scale of illegal working on delivery apps. But Deliveroo said in February it had deactivated 105 riders who illegally shared accounts with undocumented workers. Uber says it has removed hundreds of riders a month.
A study from academics at the University of Birmingham said in June that takeaway apps had become an “essential” route for migrants “facing legal and structural barriers to formal employment”.
“As wages have stagnated and working conditions deteriorated, food delivery has become increasingly dominated by those with limited alternatives: migrants with insecure or irregular legal status, for whom this sector represents one of the few viable options for earning a livelihood,” they said.
Illegal migrants renting accounts under substitution rules has become a “survival mechanism”, they added.
“If you want to design a market so that immigration would undercut wages, you couldn’t do better than this,” said one source who works in the industry. “You have very lax right to work checks combined with no minimum wage, combined with algorithmic pay. Put those three together and you’ve got this perfect environment for migration to pull down wages.”
Lee Anderson, a Reform UK MP, claimed that illegal migrants were “able to roam the streets on e-bikes and make a living”, adding: “The fact that this is being allowed to happen without a serious crackdown is appalling.”
A spokesman for Cameron said: “Lord Cameron remains incredibly proud of everything he and the governments he led did to ensure the UK established itself as a truly successful global tech hub – attracting global businesses, creating jobs, and boosting economic growth. To link this success story to the legitimate issues of illegal immigration is ludicrous.
“Indeed, it’s a legacy we should be proud of and successive governments should build on, as we seek to ensure the UK remains an attractive place to do business; attract talent and innovation; and secure our place as a global centre for tech and entrepreneurialism.”
Illegal work has now become too big an issue for the Government, and the takeaway apps, to ignore. In 2023 Robert Jenrick, then the immigration minister, wrote to Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat declaring that the levels of illegal work, and the system that allowed it, were “completely unacceptable”.
In March, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, said companies would now have to carry out checks on any workers using their apps. And last month she said the addresses of asylum hotels would be shared with delivery apps, preventing people staying in the hotels from starting shifts there.
The companies have pledged a series of crackdowns, such as regular facial recognition checks and checking all riders have the right to work.
Deliveroo said it was testing further ways of preventing illegal work. A spokesman said: “Substitution is, and always has been, a common feature of self-employment. It is not specific to Deliveroo, nor our sector. Riders choose to substitute for a number of valid reasons, enhancing the flexibility of our model.
“Substitution does not equate to illegal working, however, we are committed to ensuring it is not abused by those illegally sharing accounts. That is why we are working with the Government and broader industry to tackle the issue, with further security measures due to roll out in the coming weeks.”
Uber said: “Uber Eats takes a zero tolerance approach to illegal work. For the vast majority, flexible work offers people across the UK opportunities to boost their incomes, while fitting earning opportunities around their personal and family commitments. The freedom to work when and how they want is central to this, but everyone on our platform must have the right to work.”
The company said it proactively checked social media to find people sharing accounts and had developed technology to detect fake IDs.
Just Eat 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.”
Whether these pledges will be effective remains to be seen. But they do not appear to have stemmed attempts to illegally use the platforms. Last week, online forums and Facebook groups continued to be filled with prospective couriers looking for accounts to rent, and middlemen offering to sell them.
“These policies [to tackle illegal work] are designed to be not really workable,” says Farrar. “They’re designed to have holes in them.”
The gig economy giants’ links to Westminster did not end with the coalition Tories. As chancellor, Rishi Sunak broke with tradition to praise Deliveroo’s 2021 float as a “true British tech success story”. (The company is now in the process of being sold to American counterpart DoorDash).
In opposition, Labour had vowed to end “bogus self-employment” as part of a gig economy crackdown, but the measures did not make it into the Government’s employment bill.
Shortly after Labour swept to power, Uber’s UK boss Andrew Brem and Deliveroo founder Will Shu attended a business reception in the Downing Street garden. “We just want our voices heard,” Shu said.
Critics say the problem is that gig economy voices have been heard loud and clear – whoever is in Number 10.
