Previewing the Horsham and Torridge council by-elections of 17th April 2025
"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"
Two by-elections on Maundy Thursday, 17th April 2025:
Colgate and Rusper
Horsham council, West Sussex; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Liz Kitchen.
Maundy Thursday used to be a dies non in electoral law: a day when elections could not be held, and which did not count as a working day for the purposes of the electoral timetable. This rule was changed in 2006, but elections on Maundy Thursday are still rare. Partly, this is because Maundy Thursday falls immediately before the long Easter weekend: it is noticeable that both of today's by-elections will be counted straight after the close of polls, so that the council staff don't have to work on a public holiday the next day. Maundy Thursday's date also falls in late March or April only a few weeks before the ordinary local elections on the first Thursday in May, making it unattractive to call the electors out when they will be going to the polls shortly afterwards in the ordinary course of events. We'll discuss this further in the second part of today's Preview.
The May 2025 local elections in England will be the quietest set for many years (with the exception of May 2020, which we do not talk about). This is primarily the year of the cycle where the county councils come up for election, but this year only some of them are going to the polls because of forthcoming local government reorganisation. West Sussex county council, which covers the villages of Colgate and Rusper, has had its 2025 elections postponed. This makes an April by-election date here more reasonable for everyone involved.
Which brings us to the Colgate and Rusper ward of Horsham district, which covers the rural area between Horsham and Crawley. Despite the order of the names Rusper is the larger village: it's located in the Sussex countryside to the west of Crawley, roughly underneath the Gatwick Airport flightpath. Colgate lies to the south-west of Crawley within St Leonard's Forest, and while that word might now be associated with white teeth the village's etymology is completely different: the Col of Colgate refers to charcoal burning in years gone by, associated with the Wealden iron industry. All that industry is long gone, and Colgate is now part of the High Weald National Landscape.
In between the two villages lies Faygate, which is on the main road and railway line between Horsham and Crawley. Faygate railway station has a limited service, and official statistics show that it is the least-used station in West Sussex. Boundary changes for the 2019 election added the part of North Horsham parish lying north of the town's bypass: this is a generally rural and industrial area, with a claypit and a brickworks in operation together with a business park.
Further development on a former landfill site at the other end of the ward has given us Kilnwood Vale, a brand-new garden city-style development on the edge of Crawley which welcomed its first residents in 2016. It's so new that Royal Mail don't yet recognise it as a place: all houses in Kilnwood Vale officially have Faygate addresses. Kilnwood Vale primary school, which opened in 2019, is now by far the largest polling station in Colgate and Rusper ward with 2,339 electors on the roll, or around 44% of the ward's electorate. The Local Government Boundary Commission saw this development coming, and they doubled the number of councillors for this ward in 2019 to allow room for the expected population growth. The presence of Kilnwood Vale will account for Colgate and Rusper appearing in the top 100 wards in England and Wales for households in shared ownership (5.3%), which is normally a sign of major recent housing developments.
When Andrew's Previews previously talked about Colgate and Rusper, Kilnwood Vale was just a town planner's dream. We were last in this corner of Sussex in October 2013 for a county council by-election to what was then Warnham and Rusper division, which was won easily by the Conservative candidate Liz Kitchen. She was already a veteran of local government, having been first elected to Horsham council all the way back in 1987. Kitchen served as leader of Horsham council for eight years, from 2001 to 2009, and she was also a county councillor from that 2013 by-election until she stood down in 2021.
The Conservatives are now in opposition on Horsham council where the Lib Dems have a majority, but Kitchen was still returned for her final term of office safely enough in 2023. Shares of the vote on that occasion were 43% for the Conservatives, 31% for the Liberal Democrats and 14% for Labour, with Liz Kitchen beating her Conservative running-mate who was higher up the ballot paper: that's usually a sign of a decent personal vote. Most of the ward is part of the St Leonard's Forest county division, which Kitchen represented from 2017 to 2021 and which remains safely in the Conservative column.
However, Colgate and Rusper ward now has a Liberal Democrat MP, after John Milne defeated the Conservative MP Sir Jeremy Quin in 2024 to become the first non-Conservative MP for Horsham since 1880. Milne had previously sat on both the county and district councils. He resigned his Horsham council seat later in 2024, causing a by-election in Denne ward last November which the Liberal Democrats lost to the Conservatives (Andrew's Previews 2024, forthcoming). It appears that Milne had intended to see out his county council term, which was due to end in May 2025; however, following the postponement of the 2025 West Sussex county council elections, Milne has now tendered his resignation. We will be back to this district next month for the resulting county council by-election in Horsham Riverside division.
Before then the Conservatives having the task of defending this district council by-election following Liz Kitchen's passing in February. Defending this seat for the Tories is Josh Bounds, whose previous electoral contests have come over the district boundary in Crawley New Town: Bounds, who lives in Kilnwood Vale, was a Crawley councillor for the neighbouring Ifield ward from 2021 until he stood down in 2024. The Lib Dem candidate is Hannah Butler, who chairs the residents association for Kilnwood Vale. Labour have selected Gerard Kavanagh, who lives in Horsham town and contested the town's Forest ward in 2023. Also standing are Andrew Finnegan for the Greens and Robert Nye - who, many years, ago, succeeded Kitchen as the Conservative leader of Horsham council - for Reform UK.
Parliamentary constituency: Horsham
West Sussex county council division: St Leonard's Forest (most), Holbrook (part of North Horsham parish)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Crawley
Postcode districts: RH11, RH12, RH13
Josh Bounds (C)
Hannah Butler (LD)
Andrew Finnegan (Grn)
Gerard Kavanagh (Lab)
Robert Nye (RUK)
May 2023 result C 681/639 LD 485/297 Lab 221 Grn 198/124
May 2019 result C 684/618 Lab 199/175
Previous results in detail
Appledore
Torridge council, Devon; caused by the disqualification of independent councillor Leonard Ford.
Andrew's Previews' first post of the year concerned Instow, a village on the east bank of the Torridge estuary in north Devon. Today we're going to take the ferry to the other bank of that estuary and visit the village of Appledore. This is a busy place in the tourist season with its shops, cafés, galleries and quayside.
The sea has always been important to Appledore, as we recall from an episode in 1069 which falls under the category of "invasions of England which they don't tell you about in GCSE history". Following the death of King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings, the Saxon nobles had settled on Edgar the Atheling as their claimant to the English throne. This didn't go down well with Harold's sons, Godwin and Edmund. In 1068 they turned up at the court of Diarmait, the High King of Ireland, who fitted them out with some ships and soldiers which Godwin and Edmund used to raid the Devon and Cornish coasts.
Then, in June 1069, the brothers mustered an invasion force which landed at Appledore. Unfortunately for them, Norman troops arrived quickly and beat the raiders back to their ships, which by this point had become stranded on the beach by a low tide. In the resulting Battle of Northam the Saxon army did manage to hold the line until the tide came in and they could get away, but they had sustained heavy losses. High King Diarmait was less than happy with the result of his investment, and he sent Godwin and Edmund packing. Their later attempts to persuade the king of Denmark to finance and supply another invasion force fell on deaf ears.
Ironically given this story, Appledore has sent a considerable number of boats back to Ireland over the years. There is a major shipyard here which has built vessels in this century for both the Royal Navy and the Irish Naval Service, and the bow sections of the British aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales were built here. Appledore Shipbuilders also constructed one of the three remaining Royal Mail Ships, the RMV Scillonian III which links the Isles of Scilly to Cornwall. In December last year the shipyard was bought by Navantia, a defence contractor owned by the Spanish government, following the collapse of its previous owners Harland and Wolff into administration.
The shipyard is only a small corner of the Appledore ward, which also takes in the northern part of Northam and a large area of sand-dunes on the southern side of the Taw estuary. It's one of three wards covering the parish of Northam, which also includes the seaside resort of Westward Ho! on the west coast. Linking all this together back in the day was the short-lived Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appledore Railway, which fully opened in 1908 and which was cut off from the rest of the UK's railway network by the River Torridge. In 1917 the War Office shipped the railway's locomotives elsewhere for use in the First World War effort, and that was the end of the railway link to Appledore.
This area is part of the Torridge and Tavistock parliamentary seat, which (including under its previous name of Torridge and West Devon) has been represented for twenty years by the Conservative MP Sir Geoffrey Cox. He is a high-earning barrister and KC, who served in Cabinet as attorney-general in the May and Johnson governments.
Torridge council covers a far-flung area with a small population, and it has traditionally had large numbers of independent councillors. The 2023 elections here returned 16 independents, 8 Lib Dems, 6 Conservatives, 4 Green councillors and 2 Labour. The Green councillor for Bideford North died in 2024 and the resulting by-election was gained by the Liberal Democrats, on a low share of the vote.
The Northam county council division is in Conservative hands, and its councillor Dermot McGeough is seeking re-election at the next Devon county council elections in two weeks' time. So why are we having this by-election now, rather than waiting two weeks and getting two polls for the price of one?
Well, the short answer to that is that this by-election has come out of the Councillors Behaving Badly file. The councillor behaving badly was Leonard Ford, who got into that File for waging a nasty and sustained harassment campaign against Torridge council's head of legal and governance to the extent that she had cameras installed at her home and had to be escorted to and from her work. Ford also sent a barrage of emails to the council's chief executive alleging that he was corrupt. In December Ford was found guilty by Exeter magistrates of two charges including harassment without violence, and at the end of January that court sentenced him to 18 weeks in prison and imposed a four-year restraining order on him.
This prison sentence disqualifies Ford from being a councillor for five years, because we hold our councillors to higher standards than we do our MPs. Torridge council, no doubt with some relief, therefore declared his seat to be vacant once the deadline for appealing against sentence had passed. Under English local government law, when councillors are disqualified (as opposed to dying or resigning) then the resulting by-election has to take place within 35 working days, which meant that this poll could not be combined with the county council elections. As such, the voters of Appledore will have to turn out to the polls again in two weeks' time.
Leonard Ford has a fairly long history on Torridge council. He was originally elected for Appledore ward in 2003 on the Liberal Democrat ticket, with the ward's other seat going to Andrew Eastman as a UK Independence Party candidate. Eastman (by now in the Conservatives) and Ford were re-elected in 2007. In the 2011 Torridge elections Ford stood for re-election as an independent candidate for Bideford East ward, where he lost; his former Applefore ward seat went to independent candidate Barry Edwards, who was defeated in 2015 by UKIP's Kenneth Davis.
The current ward boundaries date from 2019 when a fragmented result saw Eastman and Davis lose their seats to returning independent candidate Leonard Ford and the Green Party's Peter Hames. In 2023 Ford and Hames were opposed only by a single UKIP candidate, who did poorly; topline shares of the vote were 45% each for the two re-elected councillors.
The defeated UKIP candidate from 2023, Nigel Johnson, is back for another go in this by-election but this time he is an independent candidate. He is also an independent candidate in the forthcoming Devon county council elections, where he is contesting Barnstaple South even though he lives in this ward. Johnson's last outing on a ballot paper was in the Bideford North ward by-election last year, in which he was the Reform UK candidate (Andrew's Previews 2024, forthcoming). The Green Party have selected Keith Funnell, a landscape architect who stood in Great Torrington ward in 2023 and is standing for the local Northam division in two weeks' time. Also on the ballot are Kerry O'Rourke for the Lib Dems and Carrie Woodhouse for the Conservatives. Woodhouse was previously elected to Torridge council in a December 2021 by-election in the neighbouring Northam ward (Andrew's Previews 2021, page 565) which also followed an independent councillor being disqualified, on that occasion for not turning up to meetings: could she repeat that trick here?
Parliamentary constituency: Torridge and Tavistock
Devon county council division: Northam
ONS Travel to Work Area: Bideford
Postcode district: EX39
Keith Funnell (Grn)
Nigel Johnson (Ind)
Kerry O'Rourke (LD)
Carrie Woodhouse (C)
May 2023 result Ind 599 Grn 588 UKIP 134
May 2019 result Ind 410/207 Grn 391 C 379/128 UKIP 285 LD 254
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