Issues such as chronic housing crisis or fly-tipping have overtaken debates about Brexit and may determine who wins the council

On the doorstep in the teatime rain in one of Peterborough’s down-at-heel suburbs, no one is talking about Brexit. No one is even talking about their council tax bills, which have just landed on doormats containing a hefty 6% hike.

A young woman in black leggings comes to the door. She has five children, she tells the Labour candidate, and she has had her benefits capped. Now she is so far in arrears with her private landlord that she is expecting to be made homeless any day.

“My kids are between two and 13. Where will I find a house with four bedrooms?” she asks. She doesn’t expect an answer.

A few doors along, a rosy-cheeked young Latvian promises to support Labour.



Two years ago, Peterborough was Brexit central. In June 2016, the city split 60/40 for leave. Feelings ran so high that the voters’ angry mood was splashed on the front of the Daily Mail. But that was then. Now politics in the city is rather more local. In the estates and in the leafier parts of owner-occupied Peterborough alike, it’s all about fly-tipping.

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Yet the anxieties are not unconnected. Down narrow alleys old mattresses lie soaking up the rain. Beer cans and the odd cigarette packet litter the shallow grassy banks between the cul-de-sacs of 1970s housing, built when the ancient cathedral city was reinvented as a new town. No one lets their kids play outside here. The grass verges of the inner ring road that scythes apart one neighbourhood from another are punctuated by bin bags and the odd microwave.

It is the detritus of a highly mobile population living in short-term accommodation. This is a city where the population growth, a significant part of it from new EU member states in Eastern Europe, was too fast for services to keep up. Apart from London and the Isle of Wight, it has had the highest inward immigration of anywhere in the UK: the population grew more than 11,000 to 196,000 in the five years to 2016. There are not enough school places and the housing crisis is chronic.

The city is in two constituencies: Peterborough and the more rural North West Cambridgeshire. Last year, Peterborough booted out its rightwing Brexit-backing Conservative MP Stewart Jackson and elected Fiona Onasanya, a remain-voting Labour candidate. Peterborough has always been a swing seat. It was the first election since 1929 that it elected an MP out of line with the national result.

. Peterborough location map

This year, with nearly a third of the city council up for local elections, the debate is not about Britain’s economic future of relations with Europe. Brexit is no longer an issue.

Ed Murphy, who leads the 15-strong Labour group of councillors, says: “No one has raised it on the doorstep with me, no one at all.”

John Holdich, the Tory leader of the council – although with exactly half the 60 seats, technically no one controls the city – thinks everyone regards it as a done deal. “The only thing I hear is, haven’t we left yet,” he said.

Yet while Ukip support has drained away across most of England, the party still has a presence in Peterborough. It may only have two seats on the council, but it plans to fight all but one of the wards in the city, even though the party nationally is near bankrupt and has to fund its campaign entirely from local supporters.

“Of course we have a message for after Brexit,” , the branch secretary, says. “We are a patriotic working class party. We are the best placed to support the ordinary working class people of Britain.”

Brexit is not on the ballot paper. But this is a city with serious unmet social needs, one that by 2019-20 will have lost 80% of its government grants over seven years, and where no one has a clue what the economy will look like after Brexit.

There were no local elections here last year. The city council boundaries were redrawn in 2016 and the elections then were the first to take place based on them. That makes the results on 3 May particularly hard to call. But Labour campaigners believe they can win enough seats - five or six – to unseat the unofficial Tory majority.

That is likely to be decided by what happens to the 10% share of the vote Ukip that won in 2016. At the general election last year, when there was no Ukip candidate, the party’s voters split against the Tories and probably gave the seat to Labour.



Some Tory candidates have said publicly that they expect the election to be tough. They hope internal tensions in Labour over Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership might derail their opponents.

But Labour’s campaign got off to a rocky start with a very public row after the deselection of a candidate, Alan Bull, for allegedly sharing antisemitic Facebook posts, which triggered a full-scale row at Labour HQ and the resignation of Christine Shawcroft from the NEC’s disputes panel.

The local party is bitterly divided between the local leadership, which is said to have approved Bull’s selection, and the councillors who objected to campaigning for him. Bull denies the charge and insists the posts were simply to stimulate discussion.

Although the regional party says it has no status, the two councillors whose complaints led to Bull’s suspension have reportedly been subject to an informal disciplinary hearing on the council group. On Friday night, a further move, this time by the CLP executive, to discuss the matter was also closed down by the regional party.

The campaign has only just begun. Whoever has control after 3 May faces huge problems. But on the doorstep, as the campaign gets going, it seems more likely that illegal rubbish dumping rather than the huge challenges facing the council will decide who wins.