‘Without my phone, I’d be stranded’: On the road with Big Issue Recruit in Bristol

The first properly autumnal day of October arrives in Bristol the way they usually do: grey sky, wet leaves stuck to the pavements, and a deceptively fine drizzle in the air. The sort you don’t really pay attention to until you realise you’re soaking wet and freezing cold. It doesn’t slow Sam down at all.

He pulls up at a Dott parking bay, where the company’s distinctive blue hire e-bikes and e-scooters, found across Bristol as they are in many cities, have been left at whatever angle their last riders fancied. He takes a photo for his team’s group chat, then unlocks each one from his phone, rolls it into place, out of the way of pedestrians, tests it to make sure it’s safe to ride, and moves on to the next.

“The e-bikes’ wheels lock when they’re not being used, so otherwise we’d have to pick them up,” he says. “And they’re very heavy.”

Minutes later, there are neat lines where the jumble was, an “after” photo in the chat, and Sam has jumped on one of the e-bikes and is on his way to the next bay.

Sam coordinates the ‘Rangers’ that Big Issue Recruit places with Dott. Big Issue Recruit is Big Issue’s employability service, set up in 2022 to help people facing barriers to work find jobs and keep them. Sam met one of its work coaches, and joined the Dott team when it started three years ago. He began as a Ranger. Now he runs the team. His shift starts at his first parking bay where he gives a thumbs-up in the group chat to say he’s clocked on. His route can vary – in fact, the day before we meet he covered the best part of ten miles, all before lunchtime. Ask him how far he rode and he doesn’t guess. He checks his phone, which records his activity, the way he checks everything else.

The phone is absolutely essential to his job. It unlocks the vehicles, logs the safety checks, flags faults for the mechanics, tracks down missing e-bikes and keeps Sam in touch with a team that almost never works in the same place. He acquired it through Big Issue Recruit’s partnership with giffgaff.

“Big Issue Recruit provides us with our giffgaff phones, which we use throughout our day to do our jobs,” he says. Without one? “I would be stranded.”

Since 2024, giffgaff has partnered with Big Issue to give refurbished smartphones to Big Issue vendors and Big Issue Recruit’s jobseekers. More than 1,000 phones have gone out so far, and 400 jobseekers have benefitted from a phone, digital skills training and coaching through Big Issue Recruit.

“Not only do you need access to a mobile phone, you also need one that’s reliable,” says Stuart Greenway, director of Big Issue Recruit. “And that’s what giffgaff supply.” The jobseekers his team supports can face numerous barriers to employment. They might be new to the country, looking for their first job, or returning to work after years caring for a family member. Without a handset, he says, they “couldn’t access online jobs, they couldn’t make applications”.

Of course, a phone sitting in a drawer helps nobody, so Big Issue Recruit’s coaches teach people how to use their phones to their full potential.

We meet at Dott’s warehouse in the Fishponds area of Bristol, which looks like the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark done with e-bikes. Row after row of them stand with their batteries taken out. Staff are busy testing e-bikes and e-scooters, and boxes of parts are piled everywhere.

Dott runs more than 4,000 e-bikes and e-scooters across Bristol, Bath and South Gloucestershire, and every one that’s repaired and put back on the street is another car journey swapped for a cleaner, cheaper way to get around. Keeping that fleet moving is what makes greener travel a real, everyday option for the region, and it’s work Big Issue Recruit candidates are now part of.

Callum, operations supervisor for Bristol and Bath, calls the Big Issue Recruit team “the eyes and ears on the ground”.

“They are kind of the life force of our day-to-day operations,” he says.

“Without them, everything would be a lot messier on the pavements.” Some parts of the city have patchy mobile signal, he adds, and without a strong connection, unlocking and checking vehicles “wouldn’t be possible”.

Then there are the e-bikes that vanish. They most often turn up inside blocks of flats, wheeled in by someone who meant to ride them again and never did.

“Sometimes they’ll just sit there for weeks, until someone can come and rescue them,” Sam says. He follows the vehicle’s last GPS location, then rings it from his phone and listens for it, the way you’d ring your own mobile when it’s gone down the back of the sofa. Sometimes a resident lets him in. Sometimes nobody comes to the door.

“I’m quite a techie person,” he says, “so I enjoy working with the vehicles, knowing what’s wrong with them and being able to fix them.” What he likes most is the freedom. “How I do my job, essentially, is completely up to me.”

He’s good at it, too. Callum says Sam is now Dott’s “first port of call when it comes to complaints from the council”, which is not a job anyone volunteers for.

“Over the last three years I’ve grown massively,” Sam says. “I’ve got my independence and freedom, I’ve grown in confidence – and I’ve been able to work with a great team and make some great friends.”

By putting reliable phones and the skills to use them into the hands of jobseekers, giffgaff and Big Issue Recruit are removing that barrier, and opening the way to steady work, a regular income and, as Sam has found, the confidence to keep moving forward.

Learn more about giffgaff’s refurbished phones at www.giffgaff.com/mobile-phones/refurbished

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