Peterborough's struggling workers consider their political verdict

At election time, political parties have long tried to woo the mythical “white-van man”: the working-class, self-motivated, but low-income voter. At the 2014 Rochester byelection, Labour’s Emily Thornberry was forced to resign from the shadow cabinet for tweeting a “condescending” picture of a house flying multiple St George’s cross flags with a white van parked in front. At the EU referendum, Boris Johnson made a play for white-van man by promising Brexit meant cheaper fuel.

In Peterborough’s parliamentary byelection on Thursday, this voting demographic will have another big say, but its members are not in an upbeat mood. Between 2009 and 2017, average wages in the Cambridgeshire city slid by 13% in real terms – a £4,000 loss that few can afford.

Their response on Thursday could take the form of an “up yours” to politics.

“I will not be voting,” said Marc Cornell, 62, who delivers parcels 12 hours a day in his white Mercedes Sprinter for a courier company. “If we end up having another referendum I will never vote on anything again. I think it’s pointless.”

Cornell earns the equivalent of the minimum wage but because he is among the estimated 1.1 million gig economy workers in the UK, he receives no sick pay, no pension and no paid leave. He has not taken a holiday in six years and has little more than the state pension to look forward to.

“If there was something else out there I would be gone in a shot,” he said. “The economy is not working for people like me. The government has allowed this and it just doesn’t work.”

He complained of an absence of dignity in the gig economy. “You are just treated like a number,” he said. He voted leave and normally votes Conservative, but has lost faith that Brexit is a good idea.

Cornell and the rest of his family are fairly typical of workers in Peterborough these days: hard-working, low-paid and often in precarious employment. They rent their family home on an estate and rents have been rising.

His wife, Susanne, works in a local care home and his son, Max, 23, has worked in Amazon’s vast distribution warehouse, one of Peterborough’s biggest employers. Covering 5 hectares (12 acres), it employs 1,000 people all year round and more than 1,000 more temporarily at peak periods. Max “hated every minute of it”.

Max voted remain and will vote Labour on Thursday, but he also feels uneasy about the future.

“[Amazon] was the only job I’ve had where I didn’t feel like a person, I felt like a sheep,” he said. He described being accosted in the toilet by security guards after he made a couple of trips to check a football score on his phone. The trade union GMB mounted protests outside Amazon last November to coincide with the Black Friday peak period, with banners that read: “We are not robots.”

Amazon said it offered “industry-leading pay, comprehensive benefits and career growth opportunities, all while working in a safe, modern work environment”.

But Max Cornell doesn’t see any future for himself in Peterborough, or even the UK. “The only jobs available for people my age are call centre, retail or warehouse,” he said. “I don’t like the way this country is going.”

He now works for Addison Lee, a minicab firm which also relies on gig economy drivers.

The most visible change to working life in Peterborough has been net migration into the city from abroad, running at around 2,000 people a year for the last decade, bringing the non-British population to 16% by the end of 2017, compared with 10% across England.

Shops named Bucharest Mini Market, the Baltic Store, the Mercearia Portuguesa and the Kabul Food Store line the Lincoln Road. The changes have upset some long-term residents.

However, the quality of work and the large number of low-autonomy, low-paid jobs in the city is at least as much of a worry as the headline-grabbing issue of immigration.

Alongside Amazon, Peterborough’s biggest employers include Perkins, an engine manufacturer, owned by the US firm Caterpillar, which employs around 2,500 people, and BGL, which owns the Compare the Market insurance brand.

The council has invested in improving Peterborough’s attractive historic centre but its fabric quickly frays into betting shops, pawnbrokers and discount stores. Workers have below-average levels of vocational training and efforts are under way to try and reshape the economy.

A new university is planned, while a closed M&S in the city centre is being turned into 98 apartments, and car parks are being earmarked for new offices to lure tech companies wanting to connect with Google and Facebook, headquartered an hour away by train in King’s Cross, London.

“We need all of our residents, including those that have lived here for a long time, to benefit from the opportunities,” said Tom Hennessy, the chief executive of Opportunity Peterborough, the city’s economic development company. “There is a feeling that some have not and this in turn can lead to feelings of disconnect from the rest of society.”

Carl Mings, another courier, moved from a staff job at Parcel Force hoping the gig economy would offer a reward for hard work.

Mings, who asked to use a pseudonym because he feared speaking out could cost him work, started earning more than £2 a parcel but is now on 15% less.

“They don’t want you winning,” he said. “You have no employment rights. The government needs to sort this out but they haven’t sorted Brexit out. This charade has been going on for three years. They have wasted all that time.”

He is among those who watched closely as Theresa May made her maiden speech as prime minister in 2016, promising to rule on behalf of the “just managing”. And then he watched as in 2018 she promised to crack down on bogus self-employment in the gig economy and boost workers’ rights. But little had happened, he said.

His pessimism was not shared by Sorin Ciobotaru, 36, a lorry driver from Romania, who has lived in Peterborough for three years with his partner, Mirela, 31, and their infant daughter.

“Life is what you make it,” he said. “The minimum wage is going up. If you want to work you can find a job. It’s only hard if you don’t want to work and drink beer every day. Everyone wants a better job, but you have to start from the bottom.”

Even so, Ciobotaru is considering moving back to Bucharest at some point, while Mings remains. Toiling in the gig economy has meant he has developed no new skills, and now he feels trapped.

“The only opportunity is packing fruit in a box in a factory,” said Mings. “You make as much as you can now, because tomorrow you know it is going to get bleaker. It shouldn’t be like that. There’s no hope. People don’t feel they have a stake in society.”