Your taxes help BigSlop employ immigrants

How You're Fuelling the Deliveroo Economy.

During an Uber ride in London, I decided to shoot the breeze with the driver.   We covered various issues during the short car journey. The Uber driver told me he loved listening to James O’Brien and that London had become unsafe. Enviably, we stumbled on the hot topic of renting prices.

The driver told me he was in the queue for social housing.

Of course, this shouldn’t be too surprising, especially for London. Considering that a thirty-minute trip costs you around £15 after Uber takes its cut (around 25%), the fuel cost, and the cost of maintaining a car in London, I can’t imagine an Uber driver would earn an awful lot. So, how would an Uber driver afford to live in London?

On the cheaper end, rent in London is over a thousand pounds monthly. Most of my graduate friends pay over a thousand pounds to live in a house with four other people or live almost an hour away from their jobs in London. In terms of general day-to-day living, it is virtually impossible to survive in London on a low salary.

Over 300,000 households are on the waiting list for social housing in London. The prevailing sentiment of the British public is that government handouts should be for those who are most down on their luck, such as somebody who is disabled or untimely dismissed from their job. Indeed, this was the initial idea behind the welfare state. State-provided housing started after World War One when soldiers returning home after fighting for our country needed safe, affordable and comfortable housing.

Nowadays, social housing has acquired a reputation that goes against the original Christian and patriotic spirit in which it was introduced. The Sun goes nuts for this stuff. Even in reference to fellow native Brits, there is a common feeling of the welfare state being exploited by “benefit scroungers.” Recent arrivals have taken this to a new level. We can see this by looking at social housing in London, where almost half of the social housing is occupied by someone foreign-born. African-born households, in particular, have some of the highest rates of social housing occupancy. For example, 73.9% of Somalis in London live in social housing.

Immigrants can only receive benefits if they have lived in the UK for five years, upon which they would receive settled status. After they achieve this, they are entitled to a wave of benefits: income support, universal tax credit, housing benefits and a whole load of other social funds.

Even if they don’t use explicit benefits, they are still a net cost to the taxpayer whenever they use anything public - such as the NHS, prisons, policing, schooling, etc. While immigrants without settled status are charged if they receive NHS healthcare, most don’t pay.

AsReform MP Rupert Lowe revealed:

“In 2022/2023, the 'aggregate income identified' was £100,000,000. Enormous.

Cash payments received that year? Just £32,000,000. The year before - £67,000,000 with£25,000,000 recovered.

For 2020/2021? £61,000,000, and £21,000,000 paid. Not only are we losing vast amounts ofmoney, it's a rapidly growing problem.”

The immigrant population seems everywhere in the service economy: delivering pizzas at Dominos, scanning your shopping at ASDA, and providing your espresso at Costa.

Ready to serve up any corporate slop you desire, an immigrant will show up on his Deliveroo bicycle within 20-30 minutes to provide you with food you could collect in a ten-minute walk. Is this progress? The narrow-minded individual would say so.

In a now-infamous clip from BBC Question Time, a woman in the audience asks, with a heavy dose of snobbery in her voice:

“Without immigration, who will be serving our coffee at Pret?”

Academic Agent recently made a good video on how the price of a coffee is artificially low, and I want to piggyback on that. The reality is that non-EEA immigration has been a net negative for taxpayers. As the Centre for Policy Studies reported, working-aged migrants from the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey are almost twice as likely to be economically inactive as someone born in the UK. The Centre for Migration Control reported that over 70% of migrants who arrived in 2023 on a work visa impose net costs on the Treasury.

Not only is our taxpayer money subsidising immigrants, but it's also subsidising corporations using cheap labour instead of paying workers a decent and fair wage. Companies like Deliveroo or Starbucks hire immigrant workers to suppress wages, regardless of the legal minimum, keeping their employment costs down whilst maximising profit.

Profits skyrocketed for Uber Eats with turnover growing 55% in 2023. The same goes forDeliveroo and Just Eat.

I made a graph to summarise this information:

The cheap labour from immigrants has given Big Slop an edge to out-compete local shops. In a world where everything is fast-paced and convenient, there’s no need for friendly day-to-day interactions with customers.

I worked at my local Co-Op when I was eighteen. The staff, primarily working-class mums from my town, had worked at the shop for years—some had been there for almost a decade. They engaged with the customers and had personal conversations during their shifts—truly wholesome moments. About half a year in, the local manager suffered from a medical problem, which meant she could no longer work.

This led to regime change. The owner (who was South Asian) hired a relative to replace her. It was a complete vibe shift. Within a few months, the women who had worked at the shop had found work elsewhere, the customers seemed less chatty, and the new employees seemed less friendly and sociable.

Indeed, many British people won’t want these service-based jobs, but basic economics tells us that if there’s a shortage of workers, it would signal employers to increase their wages. As such, a substantial increase in the supply of immigrant labour has decreased British worker’s bargaining power, much to the delight of corporate executives.

Furthermore, you don’t necessarily have to pay your family a working salary for family businesses like my local Co-Op.

As Academic Agent says, the profits are privatised to the company. At the same time, the costs are socialised—both to the taxpayer who has to foot the bill and to the community who has to bear the social repercussions of allowing strangers to enter the gates.