The London Evri drivers getting pre-Xmas pay cuts
Plus: Hampstead Heath cafes are changing, we tracked down the new Omaze house, and is your corner of London going to be skint?
If you’re still looking for a last-minute Christmas present for someone then a gift London Centric subscription, at our discounted entry-level rate could fit the bill.
If you want a physical London Centric gift card to hand over in person then there’s still (just about) time to receive one via first class post. Or, for the second year running, I’ll be delivering late orders by hand to any address in Zones 1-3 on Christmas Eve.
At the start of this month a London Centric reader got in touch to say they’d just been talking to their local Evri courier in the capital, who had their pay cut significantly just before the Christmas delivery rush. What we discovered was not a blanket policy but an ad-hoc targeting of individual drivers.
Scroll down to read how much your local Evri courier really earns per package — and how the company pushes down individual drivers’ pay if it becomes ”higher than what we believe is fair”.
Hampstead Heath’s independent cafes replaced by Daisy Green, posing the question: When is a chain not a chain?
It’s always worth seeing which announcements are snuck out just before Christmas when people aren’t paying attention. The City of London’s long-awaited review of the cafes in its north London parks was announced on Friday afternoon, just when many people were starting to put on their out-of-office notifications.
The top line is that the existing independent cafe operators in Parliament Hill Fields, Parliament Hill Lido, Golders Hill Park, and Queen’s Park will lose their businesses, with the leases on the properties transferred to the Australian cafe operator Daisy Green. A decision on the future of the Highgate Wood cafe will be announced in due course.
Back in the summer, the City launched a surprise “competitive re-marketing process” for the cafe units, prompting sustained community pushback from the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch and James MacAvoy. The corporation’s plans to increase the money it makes from its green spaces across the capital had been leaked to London Centric earlier in the year..
Stefan Simanowitz, who tried to save the existing cafes, said local campaigners intended to fight this week’s decision: “It would be tragic if our local family-run cafes, operated by people who live in the community, were replaced with Daisy Green, a high-end chain.”
Anticipating this criticism, the City is going out of its way to emphasise in the press announcement that Australian run-and-influenced Daisy Green is not “a national or multinational chain” but “an independent London business”. At this point the debate over what counts as a chain and what is simply a fast-growing independent business becomes quite conceptual. Daisy Green now operates 21 cafes and bars across London, including two at the National Portrait Gallery, with a turnover of £22.7m in the 2023/24 financial year and an adjusted profit of £2.4m. It describes itself as being “recognised as a category leader in brunch”.
Ultimately the outcome will be decided by punters’ wallets. Will people boycott the cafe sites if the existing operators are removed? Or will Daisy Green have queues for coffee on a summer’s day — and packed cafes for breakfast on a winter Saturday?
On the hunt for Omaze’s latest house: “It’s bloody Cricklewood for god’s sake!”
Omaze, the viral house raffle that captivates millions of Britons every month, has unveiled its latest prize property that will soon be swamping your social media feeds.
It’s billed as a £5m five-bedroom home that offers a “dream London life”, combining a traditional Victorian house with a substantial extension and a built-in wellness studio. After locating the property on Coverdale Road in NW2, we popped up to see whether the reality fits the description, just as we did with Omaze’s last London property near Borough Market.
Neighbours told us they had mixed feelings about Omaze’s decision to raffle a house on their unassuming street. One learned of the competition, which will raise funds for the Alzheimer's Society, when Omaze started flying drones overhead to film promotional videos: “I did do some rude gestures at the drones. Luckily I wasn’t on screen.”
Another neighbour said: “It’s a bloody disaster from our point of view. We need this like a hole in the head. Most people on Omaze don’t actually come and live in whatever they win. They either sell it or rent it, and renting it out short term is more lucrative. So, that [means] strange new people every week or few days.”
As ever with Omaze’s London houses, they provide the perfect prism through which to see the capital’s bizarre property market. Just a decade ago the house was sold for a mere £300,000 and looked like this.
Amid substantial renovations it was sold in 2016 for £1.85m to the most recent owners, who in turn listed it on RightMove in September at an asking price of £5.5m. According to land registry records, Omaze completed the purchase just weeks later for the curiously specific sum of £5,134,557 — making a dead cert to hit the top tier of the forthcoming mansion tax charge, leaving the prizewinners to pay an extra £7,500/year in council tax.
Other residents on the street were astonished when we told them the property’s sale price, with one describing it as “bonkers.” Another insisted the house was worth “less than half” than what Omaze paid for it. Not everyone living on the street agreed, with a third neighbour saying they “might buy a ticket.”
Immediately after buying the property Omaze, a for-profit company that also raises millions of charities, repainted it into a stark white. That’s the clearest indication yet that the 2010s trend of painting Victorian houses black is over, at least if you want to encourage people to enter an online house raffle.
While Omaze’s marketing copy goes to great lengths to remind potential winners that the house is “moments from Queen’s Park” and near “sought-after West Hampstead” neighbours laughed at the description. One told London Centric: “It’s bloody Cricklewood for God’s sake!”
Our story on Wandsworth council using speed guns on cyclists was picked up by most national newspapers and prompted an interesting debate in the comments. Every few decades London has to contend with the impact of a new form of transport. At one point it was what to do with the manure created by hundreds of thousands of horses. (Although this was never seen as insurmountable, contrary to one increasingly prevalent urban myth.) Then it was how to adapt to the arrival of the private motor car. Right now, it’s how to cope with the rapid increase in cycling and illegally modified e-bikes.
One local resident and reader sent a WhatsApp to say why they’re backing the speed cameras in Tooting Common:
My neighbours call it ‘the M25’ because walking down there often feels similarly dangerous. Commuters and delivery drivers whizz past in both directions at astonishing speeds, making it very scary as a pedestrian. Those of us with young children find it particularly terrifying — I can’t let my children cycle or scoot to school because I am so worried about a collision on what should be a very safe car-free route! I understand not all cyclists are inconsiderate, but the sheer volume of them — coupled with more than several people who are cycling dangerously — makes it an accident waiting to happen. I am convinced someone will be injured if the council don’t take proper steps to make it safer.
Correction: Last edition I encouraged readers give blood and suggested you would not only easily help your fellow humans but also enjoy a free “Club chocolate bar”. To placate the more pedantic readers, I am of course happy to make clear that Clubs are no longer allowed to call themselves a chocolate bar and must instead market themselves as a “biscuit bar with a chocolate flavour coating”.
Still, it was brilliant to get dozens of texts and emails from people saying they’d been prompted to give blood by the Christmas appeal. I was at the Brixton donor centre for two hours on Friday morning and met nine London Centric subscribers, as we accidentally overwhelmed the staff who weren’t quite sure why they were so busy. So thanks to everyone who helped out. And if you’ve got time in the post-Boxing Day lull, book yourself in at your local venue.
Is your London borough losing out?
There was an almighty row behind the scenes involving London councils this summer, after the central Labour government tried to change how it allocates money to local councils across the UK under its “Fair Funding Review”.
The idea was to reallocate money to more deprived areas of the country — but inner London boroughs argued they needed special treatment, as they have an unusual mix of both extreme wealth and extreme poverty.
After some tweaks, the results were put out this week, with most Outer London boroughs (in blue) still the big winners and most Inner London boroughs (in red) still facing a hefty real-terms reduction in income. We haven’t seen anyone spell out the London impact, so here is our graph based on analysis by the IFS. If you live in one of the boroughs at the bottom of this list, prepare for your council to announce further spending cuts — and hefty tax increases.
As a result Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth, and Westminster councils (plus the City of London) have all been given special permission by the government to increase council tax by more than the usual annual limit of 5% to make up the different.
The London Evri drivers having their pay cut for being too efficient
By Polly Smythe
Right now, across London, Evri couriers are criss-crossing the capital trying to get as many packages delivered as possible in the pre-Christmas rush. But as freelance contractors, not staff, these delivery drivers are paid not by the hour but by the package. And London Centric has learned that couriers who are deemed by Evri to be too efficient are having their pay cut.
The company pays a flat fee per package delivered. The delivery fee doesn’t change, even if the recipient isn’t at home and couriers have to make a second or third delivery attempt — which is one of the reasons for the large number of parcels left on doorsteps in London, where they are often stolen.
One London courier who shared his payslips with London Centric showed the per item can be as low as 34p a packet. His payslip shows a gross income of £33 a day for a four hour shift delivering an average of 87 packages.
Postable: 34p
Small packet: 36p (the vast majority of deliveries)
Packet: 39p
Standard: 52p
Heavy: 78p (only a tiny number of deliveries)
Earlier this week a BBC Panorama investigation showed how a new “small packet” size introduced by Evri had resulted in many couriers being paid less than before for the vast majority of packages they deliver.
“Hourly earnings which are higher than what we believe is fair”
London Centric can now reveal that Evri also been cutting the pay of its most successful couriers in the capital on a case-by-case basis if they’re judged to have earned too much money. Numerous London-based Evri delivery drivers showed us an email they had received from the company inviting them to a pay negotiation.
“We have been reviewing the time taken to complete deliveries on your round(s), the distances you have to travel, the parcel density and volumes to understand your hourly earnings from the parcel rates we pay,” the company email reads. “Your round(s) is paying parcel rates that result in hourly earnings which are higher than what we believe is fair based on the earnings of other couriers in your area. We are therefore inviting you into a parcel rate negotiation.”
Evri couriers told us that in their experience the negotiation over pay goes only in one direction: down.
If a courier is deemed to have delivered too many packages during the hours they worked, Evri may tell them their pay is “higher than what we believe is fair”. They will then receive the email inviting them to “negotiate” their pay rate over the phone with a central team.
“If the courier doesn’t really know how to negotiate, it just happens to them”
It is made clear that if a driver fails to answer the call the company “will assume that you accept the proposed changes and bring them into effect.” Couriers said that these cuts can be as big as 25%.
One delivery driver said: “They’ll tell the person that there’s a negotiation coming up and their rates are going from one rate to another, and they have 14 days to consult over it and they’ll get a phone call.”
“The problem is that they just do it to the individual courier and if the courier doesn’t really know how to negotiate, it just happens to them.”
Another added: “On the phone, they’ll tell you what the rate would be, and you can accept or refuse. If you’re good at your negotiations, you can get a lesser rate reduction than they’re proposing. But obviously some people are not quite so au fait with doing that, so some of them take a massive hit.”
Evri, formerly known as Hermes, was bought for £2.7bn last year by US investment group Apollo.
Couriers who spoke to London Centric said that in many cases these ad-hoc “parcel rate negotiations” have amounted to multiple rounds of pay cuts for drivers this year.
One courier claimed that the cuts are done in a one-on-one “stealth way”.
They added: “That way they can deny the way they operate. The thing the company seems to forget is, they’re a massive machine. But it all comes down to the courier, who’s the smallest cog in the system. If that cog fails, the whole system falls over. And they don’t care.”
Would you say this carpet is a small packet?
The delivery company introduced the “small packet” option back in February, which offers cheaper postage for items slightly larger than a package that can, in theory, be posted through a letterbox. Evri said it was responding to competition in the delivery market.
Yet in an attempt to save on postage fees, increasing numbers of customers are simply labelling large parcels as a small packet, meaning the courier gets paid the lower delivery rate.
Some couriers told us they have been delivering items such as furniture, stacks of bamboo sticks, or a 16kg bag of dog food across London, all of which were classified as small packets for which they can be paid as little as 36p per item.
An Evri spokesperson said: “Parcels are labelled by clients, such as retailers, not Evri. And 99.2% of all parcels are correctly banded. Couriers can request checks and upgrades via the courier app if they think a parcel has been misbanded. We have also invested in proactive processes which identifies any misbands and correct rates.”
“If you don’t have couriers, you don’t have a company”
While Evri does allow couriers to challenge a package size if they think it’s been incorrectly labelled by taking a photo and uploading it to the system, couriers say that there is no guarantee that Evri will approve the request to upgrade the parcel size.
One told us: “Some couriers with higher volumes [of small packets] are having to put through 70 upgrades a day. That could easily be adding an hour onto their day that they don’t get paid for. We don’t get paid for the admin side.”
An Evri spokesperson said it had an “industry leading and GMB-backed pay scheme for our regular self-employed couriers which offers pensions and holiday and sick pay”. It said 34,000 couriers appreciate the job’s flexibility and “generate earnings significantly above the National Living Wage, with average earnings exceeding £20 per hour.”
However, not all couriers are covered by the GMB-backed scheme. One courier said: “It’s a cutthroat business. But if you don’t have couriers, you don’t have a company.”
P.S. One of the perils with publishing newsletters full of lots of different stories is things can get missed. One commenter on Tuesday’s edition said: “I know most of the comments here at the moment are about the cycling story, but the story about the Halo Tower in Stratford deserves a post / main headline of its own - I’m completely gobsmacked and at a loss for words at how shockingly those residents are being treated.”
They’re right — do have a read of it here if you missed it. The comments under last week’s sewage investigation are also worth a look.
I hope the driver who smashed into my friend this year got a pay cut. She was driving to her job as an emergency room doctor on New Year's Day. He ran a red light and smashed into her. Broke her pelvis in four places and she was off work for half the year. He still hasn't been brought to justice.