Meal and Grocery Delivery Company Motorcycle Road Safety Charter

The meal and grocery delivery economy has grown significantly in London since the pandemic. The industry has created an increasing number of job opportunities for couriers and has been responsible for growth in sales for London's restaurants and grocers.

People riding scooters and motorcycles are too often injured in road collisions in London. While they account for 2.6% of the distance travelled by vehicles in London (2017- 2021), sadly they represented almost 27% of those killed or serious injured in collisions.

This figure is far too high and we are working with the meal and grocery delivery Industry to bring about change.

TfL working with the meal and grocery industry

Transport for London and the meal and grocery industry are coming together to ensure that we are doing all that is reasonably practicable, within our sphere of influence, to mitigate the risks to motorcycle riders.

The approach we have taken on this is set out below and is aligned with TfL's Safe System approach.

What are we doing?

We met and discussed our shared commitment to road safety with most meal and grocery delivery companies in November 2022. Following this engagement, we agreed to two key work areas:

1. We have developed a Meal and Grocery Delivery Company Motorcycle Road Safety Charter in collaboration with the industry. The charter consists of 10 road safety principles which aim to keep motorcycle couriers and other Londoners safe on the roads.

Five firms within the meal and grocery delivery industry have agreed to sign this charter to demonstrate our shared commitment to road safety. These are: Deliveroo, Getir, JustEat, Stuart and UberEats.

We will continue to work with other firms in the industry to encourage them to sign up to our charter.

Some companies in the meal and grocery delivery industry employ their couriers, others engage self- employed couriers only, and some use a mixture of employed and self-employed workers.

In order to accommodate this complexity and make the charter applicable to everyone in the industry, the charter makes reference to both employed and self-employed couriers, with slightly different expectations.

Companies are asked to adopt those parts of the clauses that are applicable to their business model.

2. As part of committing to this shared charter we have asked meal and grocery  delivery companies to commit to attending TfL's 6- monthly Meal and Grocery Delivery Company Road Safety Forum. 

At the Forum we will discuss progress around implementing the charter, share successes and challenges and new ideas to improve road safety. Other third parties may present their findings at the forum to share information they have found when working with couriers

This charter is focused on motorcyclists because they are disproportionally at risk of being killed or seriously injured. However, we understand that meal and grocery couriers also use other modes of transport. We believe that this charter can be applicable to bicycles, E-Bikes, cargo bikes and other vehicles, should companies choose to include them. There is also potential for TfL to widen the scope of this work in the future.