Previewing the five council by-elections of 6th February 2024

"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"

Five by-elections, for six seats, on 6th February 2025:

Gillingham South; and
Rochester East and Warren Wood

Medway council, Kent. The Gillingham South by-election follows the resignation of Naushabah Khan; the Rochester East and Warren Wood by-election is for two seats following the resignations of Lauren Edwards and Tristan Osborne. All were Labour councillors.

Half of the six seats up for election today are in the Medway towns, so it makes sense to start there. In the 2024 general election Labour selected three Medway councillors as their candidates for the three constituencies based on the Medway towns, and all three of them won - in each case, gaining their seats from the Conservatives. Lauren Edwards is now the MP for Rochester and Strood, Naushabah Khan defeated the former Tory leadership contender Rehman Chishti in Gillingham and Rainham, and Tris Osborne picked up the seat of Chatham and Aylesford. All three of them have now resigned their Medway council seats to concentrate on their duties in Westminster.

This gives us two by-elections for the price of one, because Edwards and Osborne both previously represented Rochester East and Warren Wood ward (which contains territory from both of their constituencies) and a double by-election will be held to replace both of them at once. Rochester East and Warren Wood is a long and thin ward running south from the edge of Rochester town centre, between the Maidstone Road to the west and City Way to the east. Within the ward boundaries are the Rochester Grammar School, whose former pupils include the MEP and UKIP leader-elect Diane James; and the Thomas Aveling secondary school in Warren Wood, which educated the model Kelly Brook. Your columnist used to go to Rochester every July to play quiz, and I have a rather vague and fuzzy memory of a resulting night out in the Man of Kent within this ward.

Gillingham South ward includes Kent's busiest general hospital, the Medway Maritime Hospital: that name comes from the fact that this was originally a naval hospital, treating personnel at Chatham dockyard, before being transferred to the civilian NHS in the 1960s. Boundary changes for the 2023 election brought Gillingham town centre into the ward, together with the town's railway station. On its previous boundaries Gillingham South made the top 60 wards in England and Wales for terraced housing.

The three Labour gains in the Medway towns at the general election followed on from Labour gaining Medway council from the Conservatives in the 2023 local elections, with 33 seats against 22 Conservatives and 4 independents. Labour have since suffered a couple of defection losses, so they need to hold two of the three seats up for election today to preserve their majority.

Both of these wards were safely in the Labour column in 2023, with Labour leads over the Conservatives of 57-18 in Gillingham South and 55-26 in Rochester East and Warren Wood. This column noted the Labour strength in the former Rochester East ward when previewing a December 2021 by-election (Andrew's Previews 2021, page 580) at which Lauren Edwards MP was first elected to Medway council; I noted at the time that she was then working as a financial regulator at the Bank of England. Tris Osborne MP comes off a longer council career, having been first elected for Luton and Wayfield ward in 2011 before transferring to Rochester East and Warren Wood in 2023; Osborne was the losing Labour candidate for Chatham and Aylesford in 2015 and for Kent police and crime commissioner in 2016. Naushabah Khan MP previously appeared in this column in November 2014, when she was the Labour candidate in the Rochester and Strood parliamentary by-election: I described her then as a "PR consultant and kickboxer". Khan fought that seat again in 2015, on the same day that she was first elected to Medway council from Gillingham South ward.

In Gillingham South the defending Labour candidate is Ukrainian-born Liubov Nestorova, who already has experience in civic life as the present Mayoress of Medway: her husband, Mayor Marian Nestorov, is a Labour councillor for the neighbouring Watling ward. They run a courier/parcel delivery firm together. The Conservative candidate Saboor Ahmed is a restaurateur. Also standing on a long ballot paper are Trish Marchant for the Green Party, Onyx Rist for the Liberal Democrats, Roshan Bhunnoo for the Heritage Party, Rizvi Rawood for Reform UK and Peter Wheeler for the Social Democratic Party.

The Rochester East and Warren Wood by-election is for two seats and so electors here have two votes. Here the defending Labour slate is Carolyn Hart (a writer and former lecturer) and Robert Wyatt (a former headteacher); Wyatt stood in 2023 in Strood Rural ward without success. The Conservatives have selected two of their losing candidates here from 2023, George Clark (who works in digital communications for the Diocese of Southwark) and Tolga Sirlan (who came to the UK from his native Turkey through his career in engineering). Completing this ballot paper are Doug Bray and Jeremy Spyby-Steanson for the Green Party, Anita Holloway and Sarah Manuel for the Liberal Democrats, David Finch and John Vye for Reform UK, and Peter Burch for the Heritage Party.

Gillingham South

Parliamentary constituency: Gillingham and Rainham
ONS Travel to Work Area: Medway
Postcode districts: ME5, ME7

Saboor Ahmed (C)
Roshan Bhunnoo (Heritage Party)
Trish Marchant (Grn)
Liubov Nestorova (Lab)
Rizvi Rawood (RUK)
Onyx Rist (LD)
Peter Wheeler (SDP)

May 2023 result Lab 1617/1531/1491 C 509/471/373 Grn 373 LD 322
Previous results in detail

Rochester East and Warren Wood

Parliamentary constituency: Rochester and Strood (most), Chatham and Aylesford (south-east corner)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Medway
Postcode district: ME1

Doug Bray (Grn)
Peter Burch (Heritage Party)
George Clark (C)
David Finch (RUK)
Carolyn Hart (Lab)
Anita Holloway (LD)
Sarah Manuel (LD)
Tolga Sirlan (C)
Jeremy Spyby-Steanson (Grn)
John Vye (RUK)
Robert Wyatt (Lab)

May 2023 result Lab 1658/1517/1347 C 784/755/665 Grn 370 LD 206
Previous results in detail

The Bentleys and Frating

Tendring council, Essex; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Lynda McWilliams.

Last week the political world attended the funeral of the former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, whose coffin turned up to the service in Hull Minster in one Jaguar while his family arrived in another. Two Jags to the last. For our Conservative defence this week we're going to move on to two Bentleys - the Essex villages of Great Bentley and Little Bentley, which are combined in a single ward with the parish of Frating.

Nearly all of the ward's electors live in Great Bentley, which can be found seven miles east of Colchester on the "Sunshine Coast" railway line towards Clacton and Walton-on-the-Naze. Great Bentley claims to have one of England's largest village greens, covering 43 acres. It was the childhood home of another Labour politician: Lord Bassam of Brighton grew up here before rising to become leader of Brighton and Hove council and being elevated to the Lords. For many years Bassam was the Labour chief whip in the upper house.

The local authority here is Tendring council, which is named after a former hundred of Essex and is run out of Clacton-on-Sea; other towns within the district include Harwich for the Continent and Frinton for the incontinent. Great Bentley has normally been included in the parliamentary seat based on Harwich, but in 2024 it was transferred into the Clacton constituency won by Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, who finally made it into the House of Commons after many previous failed attempts.

Under previous boundaries the Clacton seat had voted for UKIP's Douglas Carswell at a 2014 by-election and in the 2015 general election. The simultaneous 2015 local elections saw the Conservatives lose control of Tendring council following the election of a substantial UKIP group, which immediately split after the Conservatives had the inspired idea of offering UKIP a coalition deal to run the council. Tendring council has frequently featured in the list of councillors who change parties more or less ever since then, and at the last count four councillors here had joined Farage's banner by defecting to Reform UK. RUK had no success here at the most recent Tendring council elections in 2023 - in fact, they only stood in two wards - but that didn't stop the Conservatives suffering big losses across the district, and a coalition of localist, independent, Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors is currently running the show. The last elections to Essex county council were all the way back in 2021, when Great Bentley was part of the Brightlingsea county division and the other two parishes were included in Tendring Rural West; both of these were safely Conservative, although an independent candidate polled well in Brightlingsea.

This by-election is to replace long-serving Conservative councillor Lynda McWilliams, who was first elected for the former Great Bentley ward in 2007 (gaining her seat from the Liberal Democrats) and took over the present The Bentleys and Frating ward on its creation in 2019. McWilliams has a background in the NHS, and her long council career included taking on a number of portfolios in Tendring's cabinet. She is now 77, and she stood down from the council in January on health grounds. McWilliams appears to have enjoyed a strong personal vote in the ward and she actually increased her majority in 2023, against the local and national trend; shares of the vote here two years ago were 48% for the Conservatives, 18% for the Lib Dems and 13% for an independent candidate.

Despite or perhaps because of that large lead, the Conservatives have gone for the big guns to try and hold this seat. The defending Conservative candidate Neil Stock was the leader of Tendring council from 2015 to 2023, when he didn't seek re-election in the rural Ardleigh and Little Bromley ward. Stock was appointed OBE in the 2017 New Year honours list for services to local government; away from politics, he runs a bespoke garment manufacturing firm. Also in the clothing trade is the Lib Dem candidate Rachael Richards, who lives in Great Bentley and runs a business making school uniforms. The independent from last time has not returned, so Labour's Oli Mupenda and Reform UK's Aimee Keteca complete the candidate last. This is not the first local by-election in a Reform UK-held constituency - that happened in Lincolnshire last year - but it is the first local by-election in a Reform UK-held constituency where the party have actually found a candidate; despite this Keteca, who works as a financial adviser, will not be helped by having "(address in Colchester)" printed next to her name on the ballot paper.

Parliamentary constituency: Clacton
Essex county council division: Brightlingsea (Great Bentley parish), Tendring Rural West (Frating and Little Bentley parishes)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Clacton (Great Bentley and Little Bentley parishes), Colchester (Frating parish)
Postcode district: CO7

Aimee Keteca (RUK)
Oli Mupenda (Lab)
Rachael Richards (LD)
Neil Stock (C)

May 2023 result C 450 LD 173 Ind 126 Lab 102 Grn 87
May 2019 result C 430 LD 211 Grn 102 Lab 49
Previous results in detail

Winnersh

Wokingham council, Berkshire; caused by the death of Liberal Democrat councillor Paul Fishwick.

We now travel west of London into a Liberal Democrat-held constituency. The towns of Reading and Wokingham have almost merged together into a single urban sprawl, and Winnersh is the link between them - divided from Wokingham by the M4 motorway and from Reading by the River Loddon. Its name refers to cultivated ground by the river: "winn" is an Old English word for a watermeadow.

Modern Winnersh grew up after 1910, when the South Eastern Railway opened a station here which was originally named "Sindlesham and Hurst Halt", after older villages in the area. Sindlesham is still part of this ward. The station was renamed as Winnersh in 1930, and in 1986 a second station opened here to serve the Winnersh Triangle business park which covers much of the north of this ward. Both stations lie on the line between Reading and London Waterloo.

Winnersh Triangle station is also next to the western end of the curious A329(M) motorway, which forms the northern boundary of this ward and intersects with the M4 at an unusually large free-flow junction: this reflects that there were plans for the A329(M) to be part of a larger motorway project which never happened. The motorway used to continue west from here into Reading, but that section of the road lost its motorway status in the 1990s: this is because there is a park-and-ride site at Winnersh Triangle station at which travellers can board a train or an express bus into Reading town centre, and the buses use the former motorway hard shoulder which has been redesignated as a bus lane. The downgraded A3290 road crosses the River Loddon on a large viaduct, which collapsed in 1972 during its construction killing three workers.

In the 2021 census Winnersh made the top 100 wards in England and Wales for households in shared ownership (4.6%), which is a reliable sign of large recent housing development. The ward has a commuter demographic profile, and appropriately for an area which houses the UK headquarters of Hewlett-Packard Winnersh ranked number 6 in England and Wales for residents employed in the information and communication sector (16.9%). In fact, Winnersh was one of nine Wokingham wards which ranked in the top 15 on that metric. Silicon Thames Valley, perhaps?

Wokingham council got new ward boundaries last year, but Winnersh ward escaped unchanged because it has the same boundaries as Winnersh parish. The ward tended to be closely fought between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats up to 2011, but since then the Lib Dems have pulled away and they have held all three seats here since the late Paul Fishwick's first election in 2019. In the 2024 local elections the Lib Dems enjoyed a 60-27 lead over the Conservatives in Winnersh; in the 2024 general election the Liberal Democrats gained the Wokingham parliamentary seat from the Conservatives following the retirement of the long-serving previous MP John Redwood. The local MP Clive Jones came to politics from the toy manufacturing industry, and he was previously leader of Wokingham council from 2022 to 2023.

The Lib Dems won half of the 54 seats on Wokingham council in 2024, and they need to hold this by-election to keep control via the mayoral casting vote. In this poll the voters will elect a replacement for Lib Dem councillor Paul Fishwick following his death in November. Fishwick had served the ward since 2019, and at the time of his death he was serving in the council's cabinet with the active travel, transport and highways portfolio.

Defending this seat for the Liberal Democrats is Chetna Jamthe, a Wokingham town councillor who works for a publicly-listed London-based technology firm. Also working in the communications sector is the Conservative candidate Nick Kilby, who is a Winnersh parish councillor and has had former Cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt turn up in the village to help out with his campaign. Parvinder Singh for Labour and Samuel Langlois for the Greens complete this ballot paper. Of course, there can only be one winner in Winnersh.

Parliamentary constituency: Wokingham
ONS Travel to Work Area: Reading
Postcode district: RG41

Chetna Jamthe (LD)
Nick Kilby (C)
Samuel Langlois (Grn)
Parvinder Singh (Lab)

May 2024 result LD 1703/1473/1460 C 755/620/603 Lab 305/301/263 TUSC 83
Previous results in detail

Baxenden

Hyndburn council, Lancashire; caused by the death of Labour councillor Edward Blake.

We finish in the north of England within the West Pennine Moors, a finger of high ground which extends west from the Pennine spine along the northern edge of Greater Manchester. It's a barrier to travel, with the main communication links mostly confined to the valleys which tend to run through the moors in a north-south direction. The col at Rising Bridge, from where valleys descend south into Haslingden and the Irwell Valley or north-west into Baxenden and Accrington, is still the main road from Manchester to Accrington today: the road reaches an altitude of over 750 feet, and the railway line through this pass was noted for its steep gradients until it closed in the 1970s. Also at Rising Bridge we find one of the most important and most sacred sites in the whole of north-west England - the factory which makes the delicious Holland's Pies, at the rate of more than a million pies per week.

The Holland's Pies factory proudly advertises itself as being from Baxenden and it has an Accrington postal address, but in fact it's just outside the Hyndburn borough boundary. So, sadly, it's off-topic here. We'll have to travel further down the valley into Baxenden proper, which is a southern suburb of the classic textile town of Accrington.

The textile industry may well have set one of the Irish nationalist activists of the 19th century on the path to a political career. Michael Davitt was born in County Mayo, but when he was four years old his parents emigrated to this corner of Lancashire. At the age of nine Davitt was put to work as a labourer in a Baxenden cotton mill; when he was 11, he lost his right arm in an industrial accident. With no way back into manual work after that, Davitt instead got a job with a printing firm and then threw himself into the Irish cause. He was first elected to Parliament in North Meath in 1892, but was unseated by the Election Court for interference in that campaign by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Meath, which gives Davitt the dubious distinction of being the last MP to date to be disqualified for "undue spiritual influence" in an election campaign. Davitt later briefly served as MP for North East Cork in 1893, before being returned in two Irish constituencies in the 1895 general election and choosing to represent his native South Mayo.

The profits from all this textile work accrued to the millowners, of course. We can see where some of this money went with a visit to the impressive Haworth Art Gallery in Baxenden, which was built in 1909 as a home for local councillor, millowner and philanthrophist William Haworth and his family. The house and its associated park, which were bequeathed to Accrington Corporation following the death of William's widow Anne Haworth in 1920, are described as the finest Arts and Crafts house and garden in Lancashire. The gallery is still in the hands of Hyndburn council, who open it on Wednesday to Sunday afternoons from 12 noon to 4.30pm. Tell them I sent you.

The Haworth Art Gallery's proudest selling-point is that it is home to the largest collection of Tiffany glassware in Europe, and possibly the largest collection outside the USA. For this we have to thank Joseph Briggs, who emigrated from Accrington to New York in 1893 and worked his way up to the top of the Tiffany Studios. When the Tiffany company was wound up in the 1930s, Briggs sent some of the best pieces back to his native town where they are now on permanent display.

Baxenden lies above Accrington as a whole, both physically and socially. Baxenden's employment rates and education levels are nothing special on a national level but still significantly higher than the rest of Accrington. The ward also has a much whiter population than Accrington as a whole and it has very high levels of owner-occupation.

In an East Lancashire context that makes Baxenden a Tory-voting area, and it was one of the most reliable Conservative wards of Hyndburn district. In the early part of this century the Tories regularly scored over 70% of the vote here, and councillor John Griffiths was well-thought of enough that a plaque was erected in the village in his memory after he died in 2010. The Labour vote had been rising here in recent years, but it must still have been a surprise to the local Conservatives when Labour fell just 29 votes short of winning here in 2023 at a time when the local Labour party was badly split and its council group had fallen apart. In May 2024 Baxenden voted Labour for the first time this century, with Labour candidate Edward Blake defeating Conservative councillor Terence Hurn by 553 votes to 529 in a straight fight. In percentage terms that's 51-49. Labour gained overall control of Hyndburn council last year, winning 10 of the 12 wards up for election.

In Lancashire county elections Baxenden lies within the marginal Accrington South division, providing a counterweight to areas down the valley like Barnfield ward and Peel ward which are better for Labour; Accrington South was gained by the Conservatives in 2021, and Labour will need to take it back if they want to gain control of Lancashire county council in May. Accrington South's former county councillors include Graham Jones, who once worked at the Holland's Pies factory and ended up as Labour MP for Hyndburn from 2010 to 2019. Jones lost his seat to the Conservatives' Sara Britcliffe; a rematch for 2024 would have been on the cards, but Jones then lost the Labour nomination in early 2024 following controversial comments about the war in Gaza. Britcliffe instead lost her seat in July 2024 to replacement Labour candidate Sarah Smith, a Blackpool councillor who gained the Hyndburn seat by 1,687 votes.

Smith subsequently resigned her Blackpool council seat, and Reform UK won the resulting by-election. Britain Elects' head honcho Ben Walker stirred up some interest with a post on his strongly-recommended Substack over the weekend (link) suggesting that Reform UK would also carry Baxenden in a general election right now. He's been kind enough to give me his figures, which come out at 35% for RUK, 29% for Labour, 19% for the Conservatives and 14% for the Greens. By contrast, Ben's estimate of last year's general election in Baxenden was 34% Conservative, 31% Labour, 20% RUK and 12% Green. Obviously, these are intended as general election rather than local election voting figures, and this by-election may well be different.

For what it's worth, your columnist thinks that Ben has pegged the Greens too high here on both counts. The Greens rarely contest Baxenden in local elections and they tend to poll poorly when they do stand. While the party did poll 14% across the Hyndburn constituency in July 2024, this column suspects that they picked up the votes from disaffected Muslim voters in Accrington which in other places (like nearby Blackburn) went to so-called Gaza independent candidates: Hyndburn had no independent candidate last July, and the Green candidate Shabir Fazal had recently gained Accrington's Central ward (66% Muslim) from Labour. This sort of thing would have been much less of a factor in Baxenden, where the Muslim population is negligible. This is not a criticism of Ben’s work, rather a reflection that local factors like this will be difficult for his model to pick up.

We're more reliant on the modelling in the case of Reform UK who have never contested Baxenden in a local election before, but the fact that Baxenden has potential for the radical right is shown by UKIP polling 22% here on general election day in 2015. That score was nowhere near enough to win against the ward's traditional Conservative strength, but if the Conservative and Labour votes start splitting badly enough then 35% of the vote could well be a winning voteshare under England's first-past-the-post system. Reform UK might be well advised to concentrate on coming though the middle in marginal seats rather than try and take one of the major parties on in their strong areas.

None of this is to say that Labour don't have a difficult fight on their hands here following the death of Eddie Blake, the first and so far only Labour councillor for Baxenden ward this century. Blake, who was a retired teacher, passed away in November at the age of 77 just six months after his election.

Defending this seat for Labour is Richard Downie, a party staffer who has previously worked in manufacturing and customer service. The Conservatives have selected David Heap, who contested Altham ward last year. We will not have a straight fight this time, with the nominations of Ashley Joynes for Reform UK and Lex Kristian for the Green Party.

Next week there are seven by-elections in the diary, one of which will be at the earlier time of Tuesday. Stay tuned for those.

Parliamentary constituency: Hyndburn
Lancashire county council division: Accrington South
ONS Travel to Work Area: Blackburn
Postcode district: BB5

Richard Downie (Lab)
David Heap (C)
Ashley Joynes (RUK)
Lex Kristian (Grn)

May 2024 result Lab 553 C 529
May 2023 result C 549 Lab 520 Grn 69
May 2021 result C 779 Lab 532
May 2019 result C 672 Lab 525
May 2016 result C 654 Lab 407 UKIP 226
May 2015 result C 1044 Lab 736 UKIP 515 Grn 62
May 2012 result C 726 Lab 401
May 2011 result C 845 Lab 626
November 2010 result C 693 Lab 434 Ind 47 UKIP 17
May 2008 result C 866 Lab 227 Grn 126
May 2007 result C 891 Lab 336
June 2004 result C 816 LD 362 Lab 362
May 2003 result C 1235 Lab 524
May 2002 result C 808/807 Lab 412/367
Previous results in detail

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If you enjoyed these previews, there are many more like them - going back to 2016 - in the Andrew's Previews books, which are available to buy now (link). You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).

Andrew Teale