Investigations Editor Zak Garner-Purkis has exposed London's illegal delivery e-bike riders, describing the vehicles as unlicensed and uninsured motorbikes disguised by an electric battery and pedals. The consequences, he argues, are often deadly, citing a fatal hit-and-run in Hounslow.
Deadly Consequences on City Streets
About a 20-minute ride from a chaotic McDonald's in 2024, a 62-year-old woman was killed in an e-bike hit-and-run. The guilty rider has never been caught. Across the country, elderly people in particular are being killed or seriously injured by couriers who cannot control these powerful vehicles and are distracted by their phones.
While criminals account for a proportion of the dangerous e-bike behaviour, far too often it is desperate delivery men causing the problems. Finding out why workers ferrying chip suppers and tikka masalas to hungry households might have to use illegal means of travel was not difficult.
Pressure on Riders to Break the Law
To earn a reasonable income from apps like Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats, riders need to work around 10 to 12 hours a day. This is impossible to do seven days a week on a push bike, and given the app model pits couriers against each other for who can deliver orders the quickest, playing by the rules against riders with illegal souped-up e-bikes is just a non-starter.
These are exactly the same market dynamics that facilitated widespread work on these platforms by illegal migrants last year until the Express exposed the scandal and the government took action. On that occasion, the apps benefited from a surge of asylum seekers driving down rider pay rates by breaking the law to use their platforms to pay off debts to human traffickers.
Call for Accountability and a Ban
Here, there is a similar gain from illegal activity because riders who speed through red lights on souped-up killing machines can, of course, carry out more deliveries than those who obey the law. But point the finger at the likes of Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat and you will get the same response: "Not us guv, we're just the middle man, these riders are all self-employed people using our 'tool'."
Well, these firms should be held accountable and face criminal sanctions because, just as their lax right-to-work checks fuelled the deadly small-boats trade by giving people traffickers an easy way to do debt collection, every person killed or maimed by a delivery rider is a victim of the system the corporations profit from.
And you will find these companies bring almost no benefit to this country. How much tax do they pay? Well, the answer, in Deliveroo's case at least, is almost nothing. Not only do they avoid the crushing employer tax burden that hits UK businesses by branding their workers "self-employed", but they also pay virtually zero corporation tax.
Deliveroo only turned its first proper full-year profit recently, meaning they can legally exploit past losses to wipe out future tax bills, leaving the public purse with nothing while our high streets pay the price.
The answer to this problem is simple – ban the bikes and hold the delivery companies liable for any illegal actions by people using their platforms.
