An Uber driver won holiday pay. A Deliveroo rider has not. From today the same law calls both apps an employer

An Uber driver won the right to holiday pay. A Deliveroo rider has not. What separates them is one line in a contract, and this morning a new law walked straight past it.

Start with the drivers. They went to an employment tribunal in October 2016 and won, and the Supreme Court agreed with them in February 2021. Uber drivers are workers. Minimum wage. Paid leave.

Deliveroo riders went looking for something similar and lost. In November 2023 the Supreme Court held they were not in an employment relationship, and it was blunt about why. A rider can send somebody else to do the shift. The court said that "broad and virtually unfettered right to appoint a substitute" was "totally inconsistent with there being an employment relationship".

So whether the law takes an interest in you turns on whether you have to turn up in person.

This morning a new law came into force, and it does not ask that question.

It says a company which keeps a register of people, matches them to customers through an app and charges a fee is, in law, employing them. The company is caught by what the company does. Whether the rider has to turn up in person does not come into it.

It applies to one thing. Checking they are allowed to work in Britain.

The cheap shot is to say the checking is wrong, and I am not saying that. A country is entitled to know who is working in it, and the delivery firms have been checking voluntarily since last July anyway. Leah has the detail.

My problem is the speed, and the direction of it. Working out whether these companies owed people anything took ten years, two trips to the Supreme Court, and the answer still depends on which app you open. Deciding that the same companies must check those people took one section of one Act. Every party that has held office could have settled the other half. None of them did.

The government's own assessment of this could not put a figure on what it buys. Not one. It says so in terms: it was not possible to monetise the benefits. It adds up the costs, arrives at minus £103 million, and stops.

Three and three quarter million working arrangements, on the government's own estimate. Nobody has looked at that number since May last year. And the guidance telling businesses how to comply landed this morning, the same morning they had to start complying.

We have written to the Home Office and to all three delivery firms. We will print what they say, in full, whenever it comes.

This paper exists to ask what people do when they do not have to work. Today is the version of it nobody puts on a conference slide. What happens when a machine decides you are not allowed to.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.