The Gig-Economy Hoax: How A Food Delivery Boom Became A Pipeline for Organised Crime & Illegal Migrant Labour

Britain’s food-delivery boom has spiralled into an industrial-scale backdoor for illegal workers, often operating from taxpayer-funded asylum hotels that have been transformed by criminal gangs.

In Britain, the proliferation of app-based food delivery services has been startling, rapidly expanding to become a core component of the modern economy and a familiar sight up and down the country. Yet its near-unanimous adoption masks the sector’s troubling function as a conduit for illegal work, exploitation, and organised crime. Central to this has been the gig economy phenomenon, which relies upon a conveyor belt of new workers to meet growing demand. This requirement for an ever-increasing workforce has opened the door to unbelievable levels of criminality, with nearly half of all delivery drivers found to be working illegally during random spot checks. It’s becoming clear that this is no longer a peripheral issue confined to isolated incidents, but rather a deeply embedded, parallel labour market operating in plain sight, with the facilitators all turning a blind eye.

Against a backdrop of record illegal immigration, the true extent of this crisis is only beginning to come to light, with reports indicating that the recruitment epicentre is in fact hidden within taxpayer-funded asylum accommodation across the country. Most alarmingly, in certain locations, nearly all hotel inhabitants were working as delivery riders, with so-called recruitment agents coming to the hotels in order to onboard new workers. To do this, illegal identities are shared, bypassing app screening systems, and allowing accounts to be operated without background checks. Yet despite this criminal activity taking place within government-run accommodation, enforcement is lacklustre. The system remains unabated, allowing countless unvetted new arrivals to openly participate in an illicit economy, all while waiting for their immigration status to be confirmed.

The apparent inability to crackdown on this form of illegal activity is in large part a product of the gig economy’s underlying architecture, as this has proven to be exceptionally vulnerable to infiltration by undocumented labour. There is a contractual clause, known as the right of substitution, that allows a legitimately registered account holder to delegate their work to another individual, without the need for lengthy background checks by the platform. This vulnerability has been vigorously defended by the delivery platforms, as for years it has allowed them to legally consider all workers as self-employed independent contractors. By doing so, this exempts the companies from the provision of many rights typically afforded to full-time employees, such as a minimum wage for all hours worked, holiday pay, and sick pay.

However, this loophole has developed into the primary method through which undocumented migrants access employment opportunities, transferring any Right to Work checks from the platform providers to the account holders. These account holders, in turn, are incentivised to ignore any identity verification obligations by taking a cut of the illicit earnings. Furthermore, false identifications are typically used throughout the account registration process, even by the main account holders, with estimates of over 100,000 identities being traded online for these purposes.

Yet the dichotomy of this illegal labour open secret can be seen most shockingly in the thriving black market that has formed around the renting, swapping, and outright sale of legitimate rider accounts to illegal immigrants. Social media platforms, most notably Facebook, have become central marketplaces for this shadow infrastructure, with 80 Facebook groups collectively boasting almost a million members who openly discuss trading accounts for a range of delivery platforms. There is no attempt at hiding this behaviour, with the groups often listed under names that brazenly describe exactly what service is being offered. This has allowed an illicit market to go mainstream, providing new arrivals with instant access to paying employment free from government oversight.

However, this public network of exchange hides the far darker reality that account trading is most common amongst people smuggling networks that actively market these jobs as an easy route to earning in the UK. Their sales pitches to would-be immigrants promise the ability to earn sums that vastly exceed potential incomes in their home countries, with just a mobile phone and a bike. This can play a primary role in an individual's decision to pay a smuggler and complete the dangerous Channel crossing. Consequently, many undocumented migrants arrive in the UK owing substantial sums to those who facilitated their journey, and this form of employment is presented as the sole method of making repayments. Criminal gangs have embraced this debt bondage to exploit migrants as slave labour, using the fear of deportation to continue payments long after debts have been covered. Asylum hotels have become hubs of modern slavery, alongside other larger encampments, all consisting of migrants engaged in this same illegal work.

Beyond the human price paid by this activity, the pervasive use of undocumented and exploited labour within the UK has fundamentally distorted market dynamics, eroding employment opportunities by undercutting legal workers. Just in the delivery sector alone, there has been a significant decline in real-term earnings, with those working illegally exerting downward pressure on pay and working conditions for all couriers. Furthermore, compliant businesses that adhere to UK labour laws, pay minimum wages, and meet their tax obligations, find themselves at a distinct disadvantage against operators that leverage far cheaper illegal labour. This creates a race to the bottom scenario and punishes legitimate workers who are unable to find employment as the national minimum wage is no longer competitive within the wider market.

The detrimental societal impact of this cannot be overstated, especially when public funds, such as those used for asylum accommodation, are indirectly subsidising criminal networks that are eager to endlessly exploit the system. This represents a critical misalignment of public expenditure, with it now acting against the best interest of taxpayers, artificially lowering wages and encouraging rampant criminality. Not to mention how public safety is also directly compromised, via a steady stream of individuals with unknown backgrounds immediately arriving in the UK and gaining access to residential buildings and sensitive customer information, all while operating under a false identity. The issue is not simply the provision of unregulated employment opportunities for undocumented migrants, but the fact that this now actively functions as a perverse incentive for further illegal immigration and criminal activity.

Despite a growing awareness of this problem and public support for tougher crackdowns, the response so far has been demonstrably inadequate, with insufficient enforcement against systemic enablers and a reactive approach that fails to address root causes. Often, enforcement actions disproportionately target individual migrants rather than the platforms whose business models facilitate the environment for illegal work, thus only having a very minor impact on the issue as a whole. This has resulted in a system where individual workers are frequently apprehended and used as headline-generating examples of enforcement, while the broader system-wide issues that allow tens of thousands of migrants to continue operating illegally are ignored. Despite the UK seeking to position itself as a global leader in combating modern slavery and frequently condemning instances of this abroad, persistent and visible exploitation within the gig economy sends a worrying message about labour standards domestically.

Years of uncontrolled illegal immigration, lack of oversight, and corporations keen to look the other way have allowed this issue to evolve into a crisis. For too long, reactive measures that target the exploited rather than the enablers, combined with immigration policies that provide an endless stream of illegal labour, have allowed this system to become deeply embedded within the British economy. The convenience of food delivered swiftly to your door has metastasised into a machine that allows criminal organisations to profit from modern slavery in plain sight, supported inadvertently by government policy. Unless this crisis is confronted with decisive action, the ramifications will continue to ripple outwards, impacting legitimate businesses, public finances, and community safety, with more areas of the British economy taken over by organised crime.