Indian moped delivery drivers arrested in UK illegal work crackdown

Several Indians are among 60 moped drivers arrested for working illegally for major food delivery firms in the UK as part of a week-long crackdown on illegal migration to the country, the UK government has said.

The arrests, which also included Brazilians and Algerians, were made for offences including illegal working and possession of false documentation. It came as the UK Home Office released latest statistics on Tuesday which claim that Indians are now among the second-largest cohort of migrants crossing the English Channel illegally on small boats, with 675 recorded between January and March this year.

"Illegal working damages our communities, cheats honest workers out of employment and defrauds the public purse," said UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman.

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"As the Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak) has set out, we are committed to going further and faster to prevent the abuse of our laws and borders. The British public deserve a labour market that is fair and honest and must have confidence that goods and services they buy are from legitimate businesses,” the Indian-origin minister said.

Of the 60 arrested, 44 were detained by the Home Office pending their removal from the UK, with the remaining 16 being released on immigration bail. The government said it is expected that a number of the arrests will result in voluntary departure from the UK.

"Our enforcement teams are working around the clock to deter immigration offending and change behaviours that compromise public safety,” said Eddy Montgomery, Director of Enforcement, Compliance and Crime at the Home Office.

He said his teams stepped up action to tackle illegal working by so-called "gig workers", or without contracts, for companies such as Deliveroo, JustEat and UberEats.

The Immigration Enforcement department is said to have carried out extensive intelligence-gathering ahead of an operation to identify hotspots for illegal moped delivery drivers. Alongside local police forces, the Home Office said it deployed officers on six consecutive days between April 6 and 21 to make the arrests and detentions.

The UK government said it is clamping down on illegal working to ensure all companies and workers are contributing to the economy by complying with tax and other regulations. More widely, it can also be a pull factor for illegal migration, often trapping vulnerable people in poor conditions and exploitation while undermining the UK’s labour market, the Home Office said.

Under British law, employers can be jailed for five years and could pay an unlimited fine if they are found guilty of employing someone they knew or had “reasonable cause to believe” did not have the right to work in the UK.

The crackdown comes as the government’s new Illegal Migration Bill is going through Parliament this week. The statistics released in relation to that show that Afghans are now the most common nationality arriving illegally into the UK, with 909 recorded in the first three months of the year, followed by Indians.

"Between 1 January and 31 March 2023, the most common nationality arriving via small boat was Afghans (909, 24 per cent) followed by Indians (675, 18 per cent),” the Home Office notes.

This figure for the first quarter of 2023 is almost equivalent to the 683 Indians recorded for the year 2022. Iran, Iraq and Syria complete the top five nationalities on the tally released, with Sri Lanka and Pakistan among the other South Asian nationalities recorded in small numbers.

The Rishi Sunak led government has made cracking down on small boat crossings across the English Channel a priority and the Illegal Migration Bill is aimed at plugging loopholes that it feels makes it harder for Britain to deport illegal migrants.