Can a UK delivery app remove my restaurant without telling me?
Restaurant operators expect a warning letter and the platforms’ own documents describe something closer to an automatic consequence. Deliveroo states that partners “falling below a Rating of 2 will therefore be removed from the platform except where an Exception applies”, and that it may end programme participation “at our sole option if at any time you do not meet our eligibility requirements”. Just Eat sets a trading minimum of “3* or Pass in Scotland … to sign-up and remain trading”. None of those is phrased as a decision somebody must announce in advance.
What is the difference between removal and restriction?
Removal takes the listing away. Restriction leaves it there and takes something off it, most often promotional or advertising access.
Restrictions are far more common and much less noticed, because the storefront still looks normal. A site that has lost promotional eligibility is trading, visible and quietly underperforming, and there is no state in the portal that announces it.
Operators tend to worry about the rare, visible event and miss the common, invisible one.
What triggers removal in practice?
A published condition failing rather than a judgement being formed, in the cases the platforms document.
Hygiene is the clearest example because the value is public and the thresholds are written down. Deliveroo’s listing minimum is two, with an explicit carve-out for new partners with an awaiting inspection status. Just Eat’s is three or a pass.
Beyond hygiene, the general suspension powers in merchant terms are broad and are not tied to any published number. Those are contractual and not metric-driven, and they usually do come with contact, because somebody at the platform has to act.
Would I find out at the time?
Not reliably, and the failure mode is worse than being told badly.
There is no obligation in these documents to notify before a condition-driven change takes effect, and in practice the first signal at the restaurant is commercial: orders fall, or a customer mentions they could not find you. That can take a fortnight to register in an estate.
Which is why the practical answer to the question is not legal but operational. Nobody is obliged to tell you, so the only way left to find out at the time is to be watching, and a Kitchain (kitchain.co) message on the evening a listing stops being orderable is the notification these documents decline to promise.
Is the position different in the European Union?
Materially, and it is worth knowing if you also trade there.
Regulation 2019/1150 requires a platform terminating service to a business user to give a statement of reasons “at least 30 days prior to the termination taking effect”, and for restrictions or suspensions to give reasons “prior to or at the time” they take effect, on a durable medium. It also requires an internal complaint-handling system and named mediators.
We have not verified the equivalent position for the United Kingdom after its exit from the European Union, so we do not state one. What we can say is that the platforms’ own UK-facing documents do not promise the same thing.
What can I actually ask for?
The reason, in writing, and the specific condition that failed.
That request is reasonable whatever the legal position, and it is far more productive than disputing the outcome. A named failing condition can be fixed and evidenced. An unexplained removal cannot be argued with at all.
Ask through the partner support route and to the account manager in the same message, because those two paths often produce different answers.
How do I reduce the risk of it happening?
Know where every site sits against every published threshold, and keep the list current.
For hygiene that is a public value and a distance from a number. For availability it is a measurement you have to build. For account standing it is a question for finance. All three are knowable in advance, and a removal that surprises a group is almost always a threshold nobody was tracking.