A nationwide takedown of illegal delivery riders has resulted in more than 170 arrests.
Last month, Immigration Enforcement officers from the Home Office stopped delivery riders operating in villages, towns and cities across the country.
During the seven days of action, 171 riders were arrested. Of those, 60 were detained for removal from the UK, reported the Home Office.
Border security minister Alex Norris recently met with Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats to discuss the companies’ efforts in tackling illegal working on their platforms.
This included the firms’ continued work to ramp up randomised facial recognition checks to tackle illicit account sharing and receiving the location of asylum hotels to monitor for illegal working hotspots, said the Home Office.
Norris said those working illegally in this country should be arrested and removed. “As well as delivering record levels of enforcement, we are tightening the law to clamp down on illegal working in the delivery sector to root out this criminality from our communities,” said Norris.
”This action is part of the most sweeping changes to illegal migration in modern times to reduce the incentives that draw illegal migrations here and scale up removals.”
On Tuesday (9 December), the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill received Royal Assent. This would see the introduction of new laws to expand right to work checks to the gig economy, including on delivery riders.
The legislation would “close existing loopholes” so there would be no hiding place for illegal workers to flout the rules in gig, casual, subcontracted or temporary worker roles, said the Home Office.
Bosses who fail to conduct these checks could be jailed for up to 5 years, face fines of £60,000 per illegal worker and have their businesses closed, it added.
No comments yet