The loophole fuelling Britain's illegal migration crisis

Telegraph

2 days ago

The small boats crisis is perhaps the perfect example of British state failure. It begins with our unwillingness to reconsider refugee conventions that function as a backdoor for economic migration, is mediated by Border Force effectively serving as a ferry for anyone able to drag themselves halfway into the Channel, and is fuelled by the lure of a taxpayer-funded hotel with ample working opportunities on arrival.
Between them, these factors explain why Sir Keir Starmer's promises to end illegal migration by 'smashing the criminal gangs' are doomed to fail. And they also suggest the easiest way to start cutting arrivals: smash the gig economy instead.
Earlier this week, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, directly accused a swathe of delivery companies of failing to prevent hotel migrants from finding work through their platforms. On visiting a hotel, he wrote, he found 'delivery bags' for multiple companies and spoke to a local shopkeeper who said migrants were 'regularly' riding bikes bearing the logos of these companies.
At the moment, gig economy firms benefit from a glaring loophole in right-to-work checks. Companies are obliged to check the status of those they employ, but not self-employed workers carrying out contracts on their behalf. The result is that gig economy firms have no effective liability for illegal work that takes place through their platform.
Many of these firms insist that they already conduct identity checks on riders who sign up for their platform, and indeed they do. It's also plain that these checks are clearly not actually preventing illegal working; as Philp observed, anyone who passes by an asylum hotel can see that there are quite evidently flaws in the current set-up.
The result is a flourishing market in account buying, rental and substitution.
Earlier this year, I joined several pages on Facebook dedicated to exactly this. Each had tens of thousands of members: 40,000 for one, 46,000 for another, 75,000 for a third, 51,000 for a fourth. Members discussed how to deal with identity verification on rented accounts, complained that people whose accounts they had worked on had failed to pay them, and offered accounts for sale and rent.
The sums involved can be substantial. Pay £75-100 a week to rent an account, £60 to rent a bike, and graft at deliveries and you can bring in £500 a week in delivery fees while the Home Office pays for your food and board. And as you're working illegally, you're unlikely to pay any income tax or National Insurance unless you are both very conscientious and very stupid.
As some have pointed out, there are asylum hotels in the centre of London. One, in particular, sits near studio apartments for rent starting at £1,600 a month. With your illegal earnings at roughly £17,860 of spending power over 52 weeks, £19,200 of Zone 1 housing services, no council tax (a £1,530 saving for our Band B flat) or utility bills (say £1,261) to pay (meals provided by your hotel), and £9.95 in weekly cash from the Government, a hypothetical boat arrival would enjoy a lifestyle that a taxpaying legal worker would have to earn more than £50,000 to achieve.
Small wonder, then, that an Istanbul-based people smuggler told an undercover Telegraph journalist that Britain is the location of choice for illegal migrants because 'all you need is a mobile phone and a bike' to make 'good money'. Small wonder, either, that 42pc of the riders stopped by a Home Office enforcement team in April 2023 were working illegally.
One police officer who had been out on enforcement activities noted that a force sent 'a few cars out to find people working illegally. Each car pulled over a bike, and each one took a rider in for working without a visa or overstaying. It was crazy that we had a 100pc hit rate'.
More interesting was the degree to which this is coordinated. 'They have groups as well, not only to buy and sell accounts. They message each other when they start getting pulled over or get into accidents.
'You'll have a bunch showing up to help, or they'll all leave town and go to another area to work there for the day. Not the most hi-tech solution, but it works.'
At the moment, the Government is making small steps towards dealing with this issue. The current immigration bill gives ministers the powers necessary to impose checks on substitutes through secondary legislation, but it hasn't set out a timetable for doing so. The bigger issue, however, is that laws only matter when they're enforced.
The UK currently conducts roughly 9,000 illegal working visits each year, or 25 per day. Given that old estimates suggested that as many as 240,000 businesses may use illegal labour, even if the Government had a list of doors to knock on – and ignoring the entire issue of gig economy workers – it would take 27 years to work through the list.
If the risk to businesses is tilted favourably, the risk to migrants is even lower. The entire immigration enforcement spend for 2023-24 was around £700m, while just 41pc of those turned down for asylum between 2010 and 2020 had been removed from the UK by 2022. The Government isn't going to deport them, they have no income and no assets to seize. What punishment is realistically coming?
In other words, legal changes won't be enough without real teeth to enforce.
As a former police officer noted, part of the problem is simply that enforcement is 'complicated by a silly division of responsibility and information'. Police, for instance, have 'almost nothing to do with immigration', and the national police computer won't show the migration status of someone stopped and searched. While it's possible to find out with a phone call, 'most officers won't even know that it's possible to check'.
At the same time, with no list of visa over-stayers, police officers running into people and carrying out a check is one of the main ways we find out about illegal migration: immigration enforcement teams don't patrol or run into people in random encounters like police officers do.
Like the stacks of bikes and bags at asylum hotels, none of this is hard to find. Nor is it hard to find out about the risks that these substitution practices – putting unvetted men in contact with customers – can enable.
A freedom of information request submitted to the Metropolitan Police in 2023 showed that between 2019 and 2022, 38 delivery or postal workers were charged with sex offences. A harrowing story earlier this year set out how a woman was assaulted by a gig economy worker who essentially did not exist within the datasets held by the firm; no one had any record
Closing the loopholes and lack of enforcement that allow illegal labour to flourish is vital to cutting off the pull factor for waves of illegal migration, and to ensuring the safety of the British public. Rather than ranting about 'criminal gangs', Sir Keir's administration should focus on what it can do on our shores.