Last Friday, I made an unannounced visit to an asylum hotel in central London. I found clear evidence of illegal working.
Illegal immigrants are not allowed to work as delivery drivers while their asylum claim is pending, but when I looked in the bike store at the hotel, I saw delivery bags for Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat on the bikes.
I attempted to speak to residents of the hotel. I asked two of the migrants where they were from. They told me: Yemen and Iran. However, just minutes after my arrival, security intervened and stopped me speaking to the migrants. They seemed more concerned with my presence rather than the illegal working that is taking place.
A local shopkeeper told me that the asylum seekers are regularly seen riding out on bikes with Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat bags. The fact illegal immigrants are able to work for these companies within hours of arriving in the UK is a disgrace. The ability to work illegally for these companies is a pull factor for illegal immigration across the Channel.
These companies say they complete right to work checks on their couriers. In response to my video, they even gave the usual spiel about having ‘clear standards’ about who delivers with them and making sure their drivers have the right to work in the UK.
This is absolute nonsense. I saw with my own eyes that there is illegal working going on. People commenting on my videos or emailing me are saying the same thing. Are these companies are trying to pull the wool over our eyes? If they are, it will not work.
From what I saw, these right to work checks are not being done properly in practice, or perhaps that logins are being shared. People are selling Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat accounts on Facebook apparently with little to no checks being done. This could easily be stopped with frequent facial recognition checks and better document checks, cross referenced against Government databases.
If unvetted illegal immigrants are making deliveries to people’s home addresses, this poses a potential danger to customers, especially women. If these illegal migrants are subletting someone else’s account, the customer will be expecting a different person entirely to come to their door.
That is why I asked these companies to commit to removing any driver working illegally and set out specific steps they will take in relation to this site and more generally to prevent illegal working. I also wrote the Home Office about this hotel. Labour claim to be cracking down on illegal working, yet this is happening in at least one of the hotels the Home Office is running, and which are being funding by taxpayer’s money.
Labour promised to end the use of asylum hotels, but the number of illegal migrants in asylum hotels has gone up since the election. They have broken this promise.
High levels of immigration, especially when there is not proper integration, undermine social cohesion
We need to start removing every illegal migrant. We must stop issuing visas and suspend foreign aid to countries that refuse to take back their nationals. Labour has the power to use these visa sanctions, but they are refusing to do so. The Labour Government are bragging about returning people, but the truth is only five per cent of small boat arrivals are being removed.
Labour scrapped the Rwanda deterrent before it even started. Now 2025 is the worst year ever so far for Channel crossings. Since the election, over 40,000 people have crossed the Channel – with no signs of stopping over the summer.
The National Crime Agency has said that law enforcement alone is not enough to stop the boats. The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration David Bolt has said that he is not convinced Labour’s plan to ‘smash the gangs’ will stop the boats. How long before Labour start to listen to experts imploring them to change course? We need a deterrent.
The Labour Government must get a grip before the height of summer when thousands more people will cross the Channel to come to the UK. Many of whom will be housed in asylum hotels and may well end up working illegally as delivery drivers.
Putting illegal migrants in hotels paid for by the British taxpayer is destroying the social fabric of Britain. For decades, under successive Governments—including the last one—immigration has been far too high. That is a failure by governments over a period of decades, and it is now time to listen to the British people and put that right.
High levels of immigration, especially when there is not proper integration, undermine social cohesion. A nation state and a society cannot function properly when there are fractures in social cohesion.
My party has been honest that we made mistakes on immigration but under new leadership, we have introduced a Deportation Bill which would disapply the Human Rights Act from all immigration matters and implement a binding cap on migration voted for by Parliament.
Labour voted against our measures. This is not a serious government. The small boats keep coming because Labour has no idea how to stop them.
Chris Philp is shadow Home Secretary and a former Minister of State in the Home Office
