Too poor to ride a bus... the grim reality of life in a UK town with no pubs or public toilets

WITH a council £1.3 billion in debt and services cut to the bone, most people in hard-up Tilbury have given up on voting. The port town in Essex, which has no pub or public toilets but plenty of boarded-up shops, has one of the lowest turnouts for elections in the country. Even though it is home to London’s biggest dock, a terminal for cruise liners and a huge Amazon distribution centre, the town’s unemployment rate is close to twice the national average. New research has revealed that the most deprived areas are less likely to put a cross on a ballot paper than those in the richest ones. That has long been the case in Tilbury. In the Riverside ward, which is where the Empire Windrush boat arrived with immigrants from the Caribbean in 1948, only 20 per cent of people voted in the previous local elections. Last week, Tilbury St Chads in the centre, which is one of the poorest areas in the country, went to the polls, but the most impoverished locals felt abandoned