Van Driver Agency in Kettering

Retail peak around Kettering is not a busy fortnight — it is a fourteen-week build from late September, staffed almost entirely by temporary labour, then unwound again in January.

The freight geography around Kettering runs on the M1, A14, A42, A46, A50 and A5, East Midlands Airport — the UK's largest pure-freight airport — and the rail freight terminals at DIRFT and SEGRO Logistics Park East Midlands Gateway. Operators draw on DIRFT at Crick, on the M1 junction 18 and A5 crossing and the employers booking temporary staff here are typically express parcel and air-freight network operators running overnight sortation.

The overnight express networks based at East Midlands Airport run their whole operation in a window of a few hours, so sortation, loading and shuttle work is concentrated into nights that must be fully staffed or not run at all.

Twilight picking from mid-afternoon into late evening, feeding the night despatch.

Sortation and load-out start before dawn, with routes out by mid-morning. Grocery and evening delivery slots run through to late evening, including weekends.

A first-day route takes longer than the same route in week two and everybody in the depot knows it. A site that books a different face every morning pays that learning curve every morning and never gets to the week-two round. Continuity is not a loyalty argument on van work, it is the difference between a round that finishes and one that gets truncated in the afternoon.

A route rate does not remove the National Minimum Wage floor. Hours are recorded on every assignment whether the shift is priced by the hour or by the route, so when a round takes far longer than the route was built for, the arithmetic is visible instead of being absorbed quietly by the driver.

Under the Agency Workers Regulations 2010, a worker reaches parity on pay and basic conditions after 12 weeks in the same role. Breaks in service affect the count, which is exactly why it needs tracking rather than estimating.