I’d think that they’re getting away with it through a combination of lots of different reasons.
There have got to be huge numbers of existing businesses spread over wide areas for immigration to work their way through, and limited numbers of immigration staff to visit each business. I can’t imagine that they’d be able to visit many businesses in a single shift, bearing in mind the risk assessments that would be required for each visit, and the paperwork and witness statements that would need to be written in case of any potential prosecution or appeal, as well as organising the processing of anyone found to be there illegally; you’d need hundreds of arrest trained officers working morning, noon and night to deal with all of them and bearing in mind that public services have been decimated in recent years, I wouldn’t think that immigration escaped budget cuts.
And quite possibly the need to catch someone in the act of working illegally. It’s not as though these companies have a central office in each town to raid where employees base themselves out of, that immigration officers could raid, while being able to access employers records at the same time. The standard of proof would have to be quite high if you’re talking potential prison sentences. And there would, quite rightly, be uproar if immigration started pulling over delivery drivers as they leave takeaways on the basis that they looked a bit foreign. Even the police have to have grounds to conduct a Stop & Search, and not being white isn’t anywhere near close to being a justification. And immigration have to have branded vehicles, so even if a takeaway restaurant allowed them to come in and question drivers as they turned up, anyone working illegally would just see the vans and turn around, never to be seen again. It’s not as though immigration could raid a central payroll/HR dept in the afternoon to get the documentary evidence and then nip back out to a random town 300 miles away in the evening to identify each of the employees and check that they are who’ve they’ve told the employer they are.
I think, logistically, it sounds an absolute nightmare. And, of course, they also hire people completely lawfully as well, who are probably unlikely to be able to prove their immigration status/nationality and right to work at 10pm on a Saturday night outside McDonalds (I wouldn’t be able to, would you?)
It strikes me that if they need to direct their resources to the places they’d have the best results, as most places do these days, it makes more sense to stick to restaurants and factories and nail bars etc. Wasting days of background work, then sending a team of officers out to potentially get nobody isn’t the best use of tax payers money.
But otherwise I agree with you that it’s not going to impact immigration in any respect, at all. I don’t know if Starmer is a liar, an idiot, a dictator in his early days or is just panicking and clutching at straws, willing to listen to anyone who tells him that they happen to know a delightful young man named Euan who has developed an App that could solve all his problems. Whichever it is, it’s a terrifying prospect surpassed only by the alternatives. How tf did we get here?