Previewing the five council by-elections of 27th February 2025
"We want the finest votes available to humanity, we want them here and we want them now"
Before we start this week, a notice that I will not be doing social media coverage of this week's by-election results. I am busy in Germany for the next few days doing military tattoos for Musikparade: we have dates in Nuremberg tonight, Erfurt tomorrow, Cottbus on Saturday and Dresden on Sunday. You never know, there might still be tickets available and if so it will be good to see you there. Otherwise I will leave you in the capable hands of Ben Walker for tonight's results.
Five by-elections on 27th February 2025:
Eamont and Shap
Westmorland and Furness council, Cumbria; caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Neil Hughes.
Shap. There's a name to induce a shudder in the spine of anyone who travels from England to Scotland regularly. All of the main routes from Carlisle to north-west England climb southwards from Eamont Bridge immediately south of Penrith, to pass through or by Shap. The West Coast main line and the M6 motorway then turn left and descend into Lunesdale, while the old A6 road turns right and continues climbing over the fells towards Kendal on a route with sharp curves and steep gradients. The railway summit is at 916 feet above sea level, the M6 motorway gets up to 1,036 feet while the A6 summit is at nearly 1,400 feet and is often impassable in winter weather. Rather than face the old road over Shap Fell, travellers heading south would often instead turn left at Penrith and head towards the A1 at Scotch Corner - which is the reason why that junction on the A1 is called Scotch Corner.
The town of Shap - it's legally a town, although the market charter has been defunct for many years - is a linear settlement along the A6 road. It may have declined a bit since the golden age of motoring, but there is still some accommodation here which is well-used by hikers because the town is a recommended stopping point on Wainwright's Coast to Coast Walk. Tourism, sheep farming and quarrying are all major sources of income here: in the 2021 census Eamont and Shap ward was in the top 100 wards in England and Wales for people employed in accommodation and food service (13.1%), and its figure for those employed in mining and quarrying (1.3%) was the highest for any ward in north-west England.
Most of Eamont and Shap ward lies within the Lake District national park, while an area east of the motorway was recently transferred into the Yorkshire Dales national park. The ward includes most of Wainwright's Far Eastern Fells, with the 2,717-foot summit of High Street lying on the ward boundary. Also here is most of the southern shore of Ullswater together with the valley of Mardale, much of which has been drowned beneath the Haweswater reservoir which supplies drinking water to faraway Manchester. Around a quarter of United Utilities' water supply originates from Haweswater.
Tourism may be a mainstay of the local economy, but the Great British Weather doesn't necessarily play ball. As we can see from a film which was shot in Shap and nearby Bampton over seven weeks in August and September of 1986, and which is still often regarded as one of the greatest British films ever made. Sleddale Hall, a remote and (at the time) dilapidated farmhouse in the countryside a few miles south-west of Shap, is where Withnail and I went on holiday by mistake.
When it comes to Shap's politics, a rather older project then Withnail and I is more important. In 1964 Granada TV selected fourteen 7-year-old children for a documentary series called Seven Up!, on the Jesuit premise of "give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man". The film and TV director Michael Apted had been a young researcher on the original programme, and every seven years since then he had again met and interviewed the original fourteen children (or as many of them as wanted to participate): the resulting Up series has had nine episodes to date, with the most recent of them, 63 Up, going out in 2019. Apted died in 2021, and it's not clear whether someone else will take over the project when 70 Up is due next year.
One of the fourteen children selected by Apted for the programme was Neil Hughes. He is was in politics by the time of 42 Up, having been elected as a Liberal Democrat member of Hackney council in a 1996 by-election, and he has remained in politics ever since. Hughes resigned from Hackney council in 2000, and then turned up three years later in Shap when he was elected to Eden district council. In 2013 he was elected to Cumbria county council for the Eden Lakes division, and he retired from Eden council in 2015. (His Eden council seat went to the Conservatives, and then returned to the Liberal Democrats in a November 2019 by-election: Andrew's Previews 2019, page 364). Cumbria county council disappeared in 2023, and Hughes transferred to the new Westmorland and Furness council: he won Eamont and Shap ward with a 66-34 lead over the Conservatives in a straight fight, and he became Westmorland and Furness's cabinet member for transport and regulatory services. The sequence of TV programmes would indicate that Hughes turns 69 this year, and he is now stepping down from the council on health grounds after representing Shap for 21 years on three different councils.
Last year's boundary changes moved Eamont and Shap ward into the Westmorland and Lonsdale constituency represented by the former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron, who now has a full slate of Lib Dem councillors in his constituency following a recent by-election gain from the Conservatives in the neighbouring Kirkby Stephen and Tebay ward (Andrew's Previews 2024, forthcoming). Hoping to keep up that record is the defending Lib Dem candidate Nicki Vecqueray, who is a physiotherapist living in Bampton. The Conservatives have selected Hector Meanwell, who farms livestock near Tebay and won the Young Farmer of the Year award last year. Also on the ballot paper are Jonathan Davies for Putting Cumbria First (who didn't stand in the 2022 local elections but are apparently still going) and Pamela Pottinger for the Greens.
Parliamentary constituency: Westmorland and Lonsdale
ONS Travel to Work Area: Penrith
Postcode district: CA10
Jonathan Davies (Putting Cumbria First)
Hector Meanwell (C)
Pamela Pottinger (Grn)
Nicki Vecqueray (LD)
May 2022 result LD 1031 C 539
Previous results in detail
Bedingfeld
Breckland council, Norfolk; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Ian Sherwood.
Three of our by-elections today take place in East Anglia. We'll start in the Breckland, a heathland landscape straddling the Norfolk and Suffolk boundary which has given its name to one of Norfolk's local government districts. Breckland council covers a rural area in mid-Norfolk, with the council being run from Dereham and with other towns including Attleborough and Thetford. It includes Bedingfeld ward.
No, that's Bedingfield. Let's try again.
That's better. Bedingfeld ward lies on the western boundary of the district, covering eight parishes north of Thetford and west of Watton. None of those parishes are called Bedingfeld. The ward name instead refers to a local noble family, the Paston-Bedingfeld baronets, who have had their home at Oxburgh Hall since it was built in the fifteenth century. Oxburgh Hall, which is now owned by the National Trust although the Bedingfelds still live there, is a country house surrounded by a moat; its contents include the Oxburgh Hangings, a series of embroideries by Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick which eventually came into the Bedingfeld family's possession. The present head of the family, Sir Henry Paston-Bedingfeld, 10th Baronet, is a retired herald who served from 2010 to 2014 as Norroy and Ulster King of Arms.
Oxburgh Hall lies just outside the village of Oxborough at the western end of the ward. The main population centre here is Mundford, which lies at the northern end of Thetford Forest at the crossing-point of the main roads from Thetford to King's Lynn and from Newmarket to Swaffham. At the northern end of Bedingfeld ward is the village of Cockley Cley, which gets a shoutout here because its polling station is located in a pub: that's the intriguingly-named Twenty Churchwardens.
The Bedingfield ward has been part of the South West Norfolk parliamentary seat continuously since that seat was created all the way back in 1885. This seat used to be closely-fought between the Conservatives and Labour, and it voted Labour by just 78 votes in 1959 before becoming an against-the-trend Conservative gain in 1964. Until the mid-twentieth century rural Norfolk had a large population of agricultural labourers, who (unusually) were heavily unionised and whose votes made Labour competitive in most Norfolk constituencies. That Labour vote faded away as technological improvements meant that you needed far fewer people to run a farm, and South West Norfolk became a safe Conservative seat after the 1970s. It would have taken a miracle for Labour to win it back.
Enter Mary Elizabeth Truss, who was a Greenwich councillor when she was selected as the Conservative candidate for South West Norfolk at the 2010 general election, to replace the retiring Christopher Fraser. Liz Truss' original selection was controversial, and her constituency party - the so-called "Turnip Taliban" - had already attempted to deselect her after it was revealed that she had had an affair with the Conservative MP Mark Field. (He then represented the Cities of London and Westminster, of which more later.) She successfully rode that controversy out, entered the Commons in 2010, entered the Cabinet in 2014 as environment secretary, and entered Number 10 Downing Street on 6th September 2022 as Elizabeth II's fifteenth and final prime minister. Fifty days later, Liz Truss was forced out of office having failed to outlast a lettuce and with the Conservatives' reputation for economic competence - or indeed any kind of competence - in ruins.
Having made such a hash of her Prime Ministership, Liz Truss then turned her political skills to the question of her re-election campaign in South West Norfolk in 2024, at which she was defending a majority of 26,195 votes. It did not go well. Truss was challenged on the right not just by Reform UK but also by independent candidate James Bagge, who had been one of the "Turnip Taliban" from her constituency party who had been opposed to her selection in 2010. He had not changed his mind about Truss in the intervening fourteen years.
Meanwhile the left-wing opposition vote coalesced behind Labour candidate Terry Jermy, who appeared in this column before he was famous. Jermy was elected to Breckland council in 2011 for a ward in Thetford, and in the 2013 Norfolk county council elections he was selected as the Labour candidate for Thetford West - losing the seat to UKIP candidate Peter Georgiou by one vote. Georgiou then resigned almost immediately after it was revealed that a local supermarket had banned him from its premises for shoplifting, and Jermy went on to win the resulting Norfolk county council by-election on 1st August 2013 by 171 votes over UKIP. He still holds both that county council seat and his Breckland council seat today. The national Labour party had looked at Truss' previous result - a 69-18 lead over Labour - and understandably allocated very few resources to Jermy's 2024 parliamentary campaign, so he ended up raising £15,000 through crowdfunding.
It proved to be a good investment. In one of the last results of the 2024 general election to come through, Terry Jermy was elected as the first Labour MP for South West Norfolk since 1964, polling just 27% of the vote - the lowest winning voteshare in any constituency last year - against 25% for Truss, 22% for Reform UK and 14% for Bagge. Having lost two-thirds of her vote in one of the most inept electoral performances ever seen from a senior British politician, Liz Truss' final insult was to leave the other candidates waiting on the stage for several minutes before she eventually arrived to hear her declaration. Her humiliation was complete, and over the last year Truss has been reduced to doing the circuit of right-wing conferences to make ends meet.
In local elections Labour have no significant vote in this seat outside Thetford, and the presence of wards like Bedingfeld makes it clear just how difficult it will be for Jermy to defend a majority of 630 votes next time. (Assuming of course that the Turnip Taliban select somebody better than Liz Truss next time, which shouldn't be too difficult.) Breckland is the only second-tier district in Norfolk which still has a Conservative majority. Bedingfeld ward was created in 2015, and at its first contest nobody challenged the Conservative candidate here who was elected unopposed. The 2023 election here gave 53% to the new Conservative candidate Ian Sherwood against 27% for Labour and 20% for an independent candidate. Bedingfeld ward is part of The Brecks division of Norfolk county council, which voted over 70% Conservative when it was last contested in 2021. Norfolk's 2025 county elections have been postponed.
The outgoing councillor Ian Sherwood may have only represented Bedingfeld ward since 2023, but he is a political veteran who was first elected to Breckland council all the way back in 1999. He previously represented the town of Swaffham just to the north, and served twice as mayor of Swaffham, before transferring to this ward two years ago. According to Sherwood's LinkedIn he "has strong knowledge and experience operating in complex environments", having previously worked in Liz Truss' constituency office.
Defending this seat for the Conservatives following Sherwood's resignation is Paula Wood, who contested Lincoln ward (a rural ward outside Dereham) in the 2023 Breckland council elections. Labour have reselected Doug Jefferson, a Thetford town councillor who finished as runner-up here in 2023. The independent candidate from last time has not returned, so completing the ballot paper are Scott Hussey for Reform UK and Timothy Soar for the Green Party.
Parliamentary constituency: South West Norfolk
Norfolk county council division: The Brecks
ONS Travel to Work Area: King's Lynn (Cockley Cley, Foulden, Gooderstone and Oxborough parishes), Thetford and Mildenhall (Cranwich, Didlington, Ickburgh and Mundford parishes)
Postcode districts: IP26, PE33, PE37
Scott Hussey (RUK)
Doug Jefferson (Lab)
Timothy Soar (Grn)
Paula Wood (C)
May 2023 result C 377 Lab 194 Ind 146
May 2019 result C 483 Lab 167
May 2015 result C unopposed
Previous results in detail
Rushmere St Andrew; and
Woodbridge
East Suffolk council; caused respectively by the resignations of Conservative councillor Deborah Dean and Liberal Democrat councillor Kay Yule.
We now travel to Suffolk to consider two by-elections taking place to the east of Ipswich. Immediately to the east of Ipswich in the case of Rushmere St Andrew, which is part of the Ipswich urban area but has never been incorporated into the town. Much of this ward is dominated by the heathland of Rushmere Common, while the Bixley Farm estate to the south of the common has filled in the gap between Ipswich to the west and Kesgrave to the east. (The estate is shown on the map simply as "Bixley", but it should not be confused with the neighbouring Ipswich ward of that name.) The single polling station for this by-election is at the Tower Hall on the estate, which is named after a neighbouring water tower - indeed, the 2015-19 predecessor to this ward was called Tower ward. It's a rather distinctive design.
A few miles further east, the dry ground ends on the banks of the Deben estuary. Here we find the town of Woodbridge, whose name is rather curious in that there has never been a bridge across the river here - wooden or otherwise. Perhaps not surprisingly there is some dispute over the original meaning of the town's name, with suggestions including that it was originally a "brigg" or town associated with the Norse god Odin or Woden. So perhaps Woodbridge and Wednesbury are in fact cognates.
If there had ever been a bridge across the Deben here, it would have connected the town with Sutton Hoo and its burial mounds which have so excited archaeologists over the last century. The spectacular ship burial there is generally identified as the final resting-place of King Rædwald of East Anglia, who died in or around 624, so there must have been some significance to Woodbridge's location: however, the town is not attested until the mid-tenth century. Thanks to its estuary shoreline, boatbuilding and other maritime industries were Woodbridge's traditional specialism: to this we can now add administration, as Woodbridge (or more accurately the adjoining village of Melton, which is part of the same urban area) is the headquarters of East Suffolk council, which for now is the largest non-metropolitan district in England by population.
East Suffolk council was created in 2019 from a merger of two previous districts. Until 2019 the local authority here was Suffolk Coastal council, which still gives its name to the parliamentary constituency covering Woodbridge. Andrew's Previews covered the town in 2023 when there was a by-election here to Suffolk county council. I wrote at the time that the Suffolk Coastal seat has been Conservative since its creation in 1983, and both of its MPs in that time had been high-profile Cabinet members: John Gummer (now Lord Deben) served here until 2010 when he handed over to Thérèse Coffey. Coffey joined the Cabinet in 2019: she briefly rose to the heights of Deputy Prime Minister during the five minutes of the Liz Truss administration, before being demoted to environment secretary when Rishi Sunak came to power.
Thérèse Coffey then went down with the good ship Liz Truss, losing her seat in 2024 to Labour MP Jenny Riddell-Carpenter who had worked in public relations before joining the green benches. As with Liz Truss in South West Norfolk, this terrible Conservative result is probably contributed to by a negative personal vote for Coffey; tactical voting is also clearly a factor because local elections show very little Labour strength in the Suffolk Coastal constituency outside the port of Felixstowe. There was more of a warning from local elections in this seat as to the poor Conservative performance in 2024: the Tories crashed and burned in the 2023 East Suffolk elections, and East Suffolk council is now run by a coalition of Green, Liberal Democrat and independent councillors.
Woodbridge is a case in point. The Woodbridge ward has almost exactly the same boundaries as the Woodbridge division of Suffolk county council, and I've included the county results in the factfile below. The county division has been Liberal Democrat-held since a September 2008 by-election, and a subsequent by-election in October 2023 (Andrew's Previews 2023, page 460) saw the Lib Dems hold their seat with a 51-33 lead over the Conservatives. That poll followed the death of county councillor Caroline Page, who had a Viking funeral: her ashes were placed in a boat which was committed to the River Deben. Five months previously Woodbridge had gone to the polls to elect two members of East Suffolk council, and it returned a Green and a Lib Dem councillor: topline vote shares were 32% for the Greens, 28% for the Liberal Democrats, and 20% each for Labour and the Conservatives, but this is very skewed by the fact that all parties other than the Conservatives only had one candidate. The voters clearly treated the single Green and Lib Dem candidates as a joint slate.
The political context in the Ipswich suburbia of Rushmere St Andrew is different, in that this ward is part of the Central Suffolk and North Ipswich constituency where the Tories did manage to weather the storm last year. In fact, this seat could even be counted as a Conservative gain because the previous Tory MP Dan Poulter had defected to Labour shortly before the general election; he didn't seek re-election, and Labour ended up having to disendorse their new candidate for the seat after he got caught up in the general election date betting scandal. Patrick Spencer, who was previously associated with the Centre for Social Justice think-tank, is in his first year as the Conservative MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich.
Rushmere St Andrew ward has voted comfortably for the Conservatives at each election since the current ward boundaries were introduced in 2019: vote shares here in 2023 were 47% for the Conservatives, 33% for Labour and 21% for the Greens. The ward is part of the large Kesgrave and Rushmere St Andrew county council division, which returns two Suffolk county councillors and is safely Conservative.
Today's Woodbridge ward by-election is to replace Liberal Democrat councillor Kay Yule, who resigned from the council on health grounds in December; unfortunately, she passed away shortly afterwards. Yule had served since 2019. The outgoing Rushmere St Andrew councillor, Deborah Dean of the Conservatives, submitted her resignation in January; she had served since 2023.
In Rushmere St Andrew ward the defending Conservative candidate is Robert Cawley, who is the managing director of a local golf club. Labour have selected Laurence Bradley, who has worked in the community as a charity trustee and Scout leader while working in the IT sector. Standing for the Green Party is Julian Cusack, a chartered accountant who has previous local government experience - albeit some time ago - as a Labour member of Suffolk county council from 1981 to 1989. Reform UK's Alistair Jeffreys completes the ballot.
The defending Liberal Democrat candidate for Woodbridge is Ruth Leach, a photographer who won the county council by-election in October 2023 and now has the chance to double up at county and district level. It would appear that the Green Party, who topped the poll here in May 2023 and are the Lib Dems' coalition partners on East Suffolk council, are not standing against her. Labour have selected Des Waters, who is a retired environmental health officer. The Conservative candidate Alan Porter, a former chair of the neighbouring Melton parish council, is back for another go after he finished second to Ruth Leach in the October 2023 county by-election. Garry Debenham of Reform UK is the other candidate here.
Rushmere St Andrew
Parliamentary constituency: Central Suffolk and North Ipswich
Suffolk county council division: Kesgrave and Rushmere St Andrew
ONS Travel to Work Area: Ipswich
Postcode districts: IP3, IP4, IP5
Laurence Bradley (Lab)
Robert Cawley (C)
Julian Cusack (Grn)
Alistair Jeffreys (RUK)
May 2023 result C 582 Lab 405 Grn 256
May 2019 result C 663 Grn 252 Lab 230
Previous results in detail
Woodbridge
Parliamentary constituency: Suffolk Coastal
Suffolk county council division: Woodbridge
ONS Travel to Work Area: Ipswich
Postcode districts: IP12, IP13
Garry Debenham (RUK)
Ruth Leach (LD)
Alan Porter (C)
Des Waters (Lab)
October 2023 county council by-election LD 990 C 642 Lab 301
May 2023 result Grn 1404 LD 1220 Lab 864 C 845/776
May 2021 county council result LD 1887 C 1086
May 2019 result LD 1555 C 1070/1036 Lab 1035
May 2017 county council result LD 1547 C 1041 Lab 254 Grn 113 UKIP 55
May 2013 county council result LD 1127 C 870 UKIP 327 Lab 255 Grn 122
June 2009 county council result LD 1460 C 1231 Grn 148 Lab 156
September 2008 county council by-election LD 970 C 826 Ind 378 Lab 147
May 2005 county council result C 1720 LD 1698 Lab 884
Previous results in detail
Vincent Square
Westminster council, London; caused by the death of Labour councillor Gillian Arrindell.
We finish for this week in the heart of the capital, not so far from the Palace of Westminster where MPs have been back this week following their half-term break. Lying less than a mile south-west of Parliament, Vincent Square is London's largest privately-owned square: it's owned by Westminster School, which uses it as playing fields, and it is named after William Vincent who enclosed the square for this specific purpose. Vincent was the headmaster of Westminster School from 1788 and then Dean of Westminster from 1802 until his death in 1815. He was noted in his day for his scholarship, particularly in geography; he was also a big fan of corporal punishment, and in 1792 he expelled the future poet laureate Robert Southey from the school for writing an article opposing flogging.
Vincent Square was the location of the earliest known football match in the London area, when Westminster School played Dingley Dell on 24th November 1858. This was a time when there was little consensus over the rules of football. Dingley Dell and Westminster School both preferred kicking the ball rather than handling it, while Westminster and Charterhouse schools were in favour of rules which allowed forward passes. These opinions prevailed when the Football Association, once it was formed a few years later, drew up the laws for what became known as association football.
Number 1 Vincent Square is the current headquarters of the Liberal Democrats, and they are not the only major political party to have been based in this ward at some point. The current Vincent Square ward is a wedge shape to the north of Vauxhall Bridge Road, running from just outside Victoria station to the Thames riverfront at Millbank. Westminster Cathedral, the UK's largest Roman Catholic church, lies near the point of the wedge: while the ward's riverfront is mostly occupied by the Tate Britain art gallery, the skyscraper of Millbank Tower and T***** H*****, which since 1994 has been the headquarters of MI5. The Millbank Tower complex has been home at various times to both the Labour and Conservative parties together with that most important of bodies which affect our local elections: I speak, of course, of the Local Government Boundary Commission for England. (Although they are now based in Islington.)
To the best of my knowledge the LGBCE don't look at the census demographic information when drawing their ward boundaries, but this column is not so restricted. In the 2021 census Vincent Square ranked number 8 of all the wards in England and Wales for flats or apartments, which make up 97.0% of households here. (The 7 above it on the list are the City of London which counts as one ward for this purpose, four other London wards, and the two wards covering Manchester city centre: unlike Vincent Square, a number of those have been the subject of major highrise housing developments in the last decade.) Vincent Square is also in the top 100 for residents born in the EU-14 countries (13.9%), residents born in European countries outside the EU (5.7%), households with no access to a car (68.5%), residents working in the financial or insurance sector (13.0%) and the White Other ethnic group (27.2%).
A fair chunk of the housing here is let on social rents within the Millbank and Grosvenor estates: the former was developed by the London County Council between 1897 and 1902 to rehouse Londoners whose homes had been swept away to build Kingsway, while the latter was built in the 1920s and 1930s on land owned by the Duke of Westminster to a design by Sir Edwin Lutyens. The predecessor Millbank ward was marginal and it returned both Labour and Conservative councillors in its time: one of its past Conservative councillors was the future MP Teresa Gorman, who sat on Westminster council from 1982 to 1986.
However, the Victoria end of the ward is dominated by very exclusive mansion blocks, and this had made Vincent Square a safe Conservative ward since its creation in 2002. Until 2022, that is: Labour gained control of Westminster city council in that year for the first time, and as part of that process they gained one of the three seats in Vincent Square. Shares of the vote were 45% for the Conservatives - who held the ward's other two seats - and 43% for Labour. The Labour party followed up on that by gaining the Cities of London and Westminster constituency at last year's general election, shortly after they had gained the West Central constituency in the 2024 London Assembly election.
So this will be a difficult seat for Labour to defend following the death of their councillor Gillian Arrindell, who was the council's lead member for air quality and a disability champion. Westminster council's statement also noted her history as a local activist who helped people with issues ranging from housing and welfare to domestic violence.
The defending Labour candidate Joanna Camadoo-Rothwell is in the same vein, as she is the head of public affairs and policy for a national domestic abuse charity; she also has previous local government experience, having served as an Ealing councillor from 2014 to 2022 under her previous surname of Camadoo. The Conservatives have selected Martin Hayes, a publican who was their unsuccessful candidate here in 2022. Also standing are Luis Garcia for the Lib Dems, Gabriela Fajardo for the Christian Peoples Alliance, Nick Lockett for Reform UK and Sanya Mihaylovic for the Greens.
Parliamentary constituency: Cities of London and Westminster
London Assembly constituency: West Central
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: SW1E, SW1P, SW1V
Joanna Camadoo-Rothwell (Lab)
Gabriela Fajardo (CPA)
Luis Garcia (LD)
Martin Hayes (C)
Nick Lockett (RUK)
Sanya Mihaylovic (Grn)
May 2022 results C 1377/1305/1297 Lab 1324/1232/1155 LD 371/271/269
Previous results in detail
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