"Deliveroo riders can earn as little as £2 an hour during shifts, as boss stands to make £500m", 25 March 2021

As Deliveroo prepares for a multibillion-pound stock market flotation that could net its chief executive as much as £500m, an investigation by the Bureau has found that some of the riders upon whose backs the business was built have been receiving less than the minimum wage per shift.

Our analysis of thousands of invoices from more than 300 riders over the past year shows that one in three made on average less than £8.72, the national minimum wage for those over 25, for their overall time per session in the app...[A] cyclist in Yorkshire was logged in for 180 hours and was paid the equivalent of £2 per hour. This is perfectly legal because riders are treated by Deliveroo as being self-employed.

...Riders are getting these rates even as the company likens them to pandemic key workers.

While Deliveroo riders are classed as “self-employed” [...] a recent court ruling has put that position in doubt. In February, the Supreme Court confirmed that Uber drivers should be treated as workers, not self employed. As such drivers should be entitled to minimum national wage rates and the entire time drivers are logged on and available for work should be appropriately taken into account when ensuring overall pay.

...The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) developed a tool to collect invoices from Deliveroo riders. The Bureau has independently analysed and checked this data – from more than 300 of Deliveroo’s 50,000 riders across the UK – to produce the first reliable dataset on British gig economy pay. The Bureau also spoke to riders in London, Cardiff, Reading, Newcastle, York and Leicester.

... The company has headed off concerns about its business practices by setting up a £50m pandemic recovery fund and offering payments of up to £10,000 to its longest serving riders...One rider in York calculated that his £200 Deliveroo bonus amounted to 6.8p for each order he had done.