Big tech firms: profiting from misery

A new report into 'fake e-bikes' reveals a problem, with solutions

The fruit is rotten, and there are flies in the fries. In your online delivery parcel, death is waiting. And we have bought into the con, wholesale.

A month ago I sat in on an evidence session in Portcullis House, part of the Houses of Parliament, to hear about the rise of what we now term ‘fake e-bikes’ – illegally fast, high-powered bicycle conversions with throttles that are, in fact, legally motorbikes. This was part of an inquiry into the rise in e-bike fires and illegal e-bikes on the streets of Britain. These unsafe, unregulated products are not only risking lives through house fires but harming the cycling industry’s reputation and anyone who uses a legal electric bike, in particular their ability to travel with and insure it at home and at work.

Water, abuse and badly-wired electrics - a recipe for disaster. As seen in Stratford, East London, May 2025

In total we had 13 in-person witnesses and received 60 written submissions to the inquiry. Witness after witness pointed the finger for this growing problem, in one direction: the gig economy and online sellers.

Thanks to a ‘substitution’ loophole exploited by delivery firms (where a rider can hand their shift to someone else) riders are no longer classed as ‘workers’, therefore they aren’t entitled to protections like minimum wages, sick or holiday pay. This has undermined app-based food delivery work to the point riders are reportedly working 14 hour shifts in all weathers for as little as £3 an hour. This work, free from the most basic oversight, has attracted the most vulnerable in society – some seemingly working illegally by renting other riders’ accounts – and they do what they can to make ends meet. They buy the cheapest products, without the necessary safety features, and ride as fast as they can for as long as they can each day, with little to no protection from the firms whose deliveries they carry. They are also vulnerable to gangmaster-type relationships.

One delivery rider, representing the gig economy union, the IWGB, put it bluntly.

Rider Shaf Hussain said:

“A lot of platforms, they say they pay minimum wage. Let me put it, they don’t pay minimum wage if I stop at every single light. The only way I’m going to make minimum wage is if I run every single traffic light between me, the restaurant and the customer.”

The situation was compared by one witness to the ‘sweated labour’ practices of the 1840s industrial revolution in England.

Callum Cant, author of Riding for Deliveroo, and senior lecturer at Essex Business School, said:

“People talking about working 14 hour days, this is exactly the kind of thing you read about in the industrial revolution; this is sweated labor; all of the protections associated with the employment relationship are meant to prevent exploitation, and that’s completely damaged. What’s going on here is as bad, if not worse, than many of the things you read about in the 1840s”.

This is exploitation in broad daylight. It’s the most vulnerable in society working for poverty wages and taking risks with theirs and others’ safety to try and make ends meet.

And the delivery companies? The online marketplaces selling these dangerous kits? They give the distinct impression of inaction, apathy. Not one of the major delivery companies sent a representative to the in-person evidence sessions, saying no-one was available at fairly short notice. What we got were statements claiming riders enjoy the flexibility the work offers, and that companies take reports of dangerous or illegal equipment use seriously, and stop working with those they suspect of using things like illegally modified fake e-bikes. Whatever action they are taking is not working.

Have no doubt, though: this is a UK problem. I’ve just spent two weeks traveling around Europe by train, visiting five countries and staying in four cities: Berlin, Gdansk, Malmo and Copenhagen. I haven’t seen a single fake e-bike. Delivery riders pedal a regular bike or, rarely, a legal ebike. The moped delivery drivers use the bike lanes, but that’s about the worst that I saw.

It is possible to end this exploitation. In Spain, in 2021 the government cracked down on use of employment law loopholes by delivery companies and, after a struggle, got them to use proper employment practices like social security contributions. Deliveroo were ordered to pay 1.3m euros in Spain in social security after a court ruled 748 riders were fake self-employed. Even in America, New York City introduced a requirement that delivery riders make a minimum wage; they were having the same fake e-bike problem.

In the EU the platform work directive will make a presumption of employed status for platform workers and give stronger collective labour rights and robust enforcement standards.

The fact is unless forced, large tech and delivery companies will keep saying everything is fine, or that it’s out of their remit, regardless of the evidence. This corporate gaslighting risks lives and ultimately creates profit out of misery.

Then there’s the online marketplaces. Amazon told us fake e-bike conversion kits we found have no place on their site, and that if the Office for Product Safety and Standards, the OPSS, required them to take them off the site, as they did with hoverboards, Amazon would act immediately. If there were a kitemark for legal e-bikes, Transport for London would reverse its ban and insurers would cover electric cycles again.

It’s time for big companies to take responsibility for the work people are doing for their firms, the products sold on their sites, and to manage the risks that work might pose both on the streets and in homes and buildings. Still, the report has shown it needs the force of officials, and law, or change won’t happen. MPs must act to bring about legislation to close the ‘substitution’ loophole, and force online companies to take these products down from sale.

As the author, I’m immensely proud of this report. It was a team effort with Fusion Media, who have done a fantastic job setting up the inquiry, managing evidence and witnesses, putting the report together and getting it picked up by major news outlets from the BBC to the Sunday Times to the Guardian and the i Paper – as well as of course the cycling media, and the fire safety and retail sector press. The All Party Parliamentary Group’s Parliamentarians were fierce in their questioning and in their support for the recommendations, and it seems that support is only growing to the broader legislature.

The recommendations:

• Make online marketplaces legally accountable for the safety of the products they host
• Ban unsafe e-bike conversion kits and close the ‘off-road use’ sales loophole
• Create a government-backed kitemark for safe e-bikes, allowing bans on good bikes to be lifted
• Give police new powers to seize illegal or dangerous e-bikes
• End the legal loopholes that allow delivery platforms to outsource risk and avoid responsibility
• Launch a national scrappage scheme for unsafe bikes and kits, funded by the gig economy companies that rely on them

And the full report is here: https://appgcw.org/resources/inquiries/unregulated-and-unsafe-the-threat-of-illegal-e-bikes/