Takeaway delivery company faces row with couriers after it said they would be paid per delivery, instead of by the hour

Deliveroo is embroiled in a row over pay with its couriers after dozens of workers staged protests against a new wage structure.

The takeaway delivery company said 40 riders had visited its central London office on Wednesday to demonstrate against the changes, which will see workers paid £3.75 per delivery. Previously, they received £7 an hour, plus £1 for each delivery, across London, while workers outside the capital were paid slightly less.

Deliveroo, which raised $275m (£212m) from investors this month, said it would roll out the pay terms from next week and claimed that couriers had responded positively in early trials.

“What we have seen from previous trials that we have been running in other parts of London is that riders have reacted positively to the trial, and fees rise to more than twice what they were over a lunch or dinner, compared to the old payment model,” it said.

A photo published on Twitter on Thursday morning appeared to show a protest by Deliveroo couriers in West Hampstead, north-west London.

Deliveroo couriers are self-employed, which means that they are not entitled to the “national living wage”, currently set at £7.20 an hour. Some have suggested that the new structure will make it hard for them to earn as much as they took home while on hourly pay rates.

Outside London, one rider said he and his co-workers had been given 48 hours’ notice of a meeting telling them that they would be part of a trial starting this week.

He said he could see why the hourly rate was being dropped. “I have been sat in my city doing nothing waiting for orders and so they are paying me for nothing,” the driver said.

However, he expressed concerns over whether the structure would pay as well as Deliveroo claimed and said the removal of schedules for workers, which determine the timing of delivery shifts, would have an impact.

“They said they had data from an area similar to mine where they had trialled this and gave an average delivery time,” the driver said. “However, this only included picking up and doing the delivery, and not the time spent cycling/driving back to the ‘zone centre’, where all the restaurants are.

“They are getting rid of the staff schedule and instead you can log in whenever you want; this means that at peak times there will obviously be more people logging in and therefore fewer orders per driver.”

In a statement, Deliveroo said: “After feedback from our rider surveys, we learnt that the most important thing to our riders about the job is flexibility. We’ve designed this trial to enhance flexibility, allowing riders to work whenever they want by logging on and off as desired.

“The 2.2km size of each delivery zone has been designed with delivery distance and time in mind. Following extensive testing, this zone size was found to be the optimum size for ensuring that riders can complete 2-3 orders an hour safely and with plenty of time, while still receiving fees of more than £10 per hour across the lunch and dinner times our riders work.”



The company said that the trial was designed to “better reflect the way that riders work with us”.

“Along with this increased flexibility, we’ve seen average hourly fees for riders in previous trials rise to more than 2.1 times the previous payment model at our busiest times,” Deliveroo said.

Earlier this year, a Deliveroo worker told the Guardian the most he had made was £32 in a three-hour shift and that customers did not tend to pay tips on top of this.

Riders for Deliveroo were asked to sign contracts banning them from taking claims over their employment status to court. The clauses were described as unenforceable by employment lawyers.