Previewing the Plymouth mayoral referendum and the nine local by-elections of 17th July 2025

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

There are nine by-elections on 17th July 2025, but first Andrew’s Previews has another poll to bring you:

Plymouth Mayoral Referendum

First on the bill this week, we have what will probably be the last-ever poll of its kind: a referendum on establishing an elected mayor of a city.

In England, there are three possible ways to run a council. The most common of these is the "leader and cabinet" model, which will be familiar to Westminster watchers: from time to time the full council elects a leader, who appoints a cabinet of councillors (who are normally politically aligned with the leader) to take responsibility for specific portfolios or policy areas. Some councils - often, but not exclusively, smaller district councils - might operate the "committee system", where those responsibilities are delegated by the council to committees of councillors. And the rarest model is the elected mayoral system, where a mayor of the district is directly elected for a four-year term and appoints a cabinet of councillors, who may or may not be in the majority on the council.

Since 2001 it has been possible to force a referendum on changing from one of these models to another by getting 5% of the electorate to sign a petition in favour of the change. The returning officer has to publish the number of signatures required for a successful petition once a year. In 2012 Government-ordered mayoral referendums were additionally held in 10 of the 12 largest cities in England outside London (the other two, Leicester and Liverpool, established a mayor of their own volition).

Today's poll in Plymouth will be the 55th mayoral referendum in a series going back to 7th June 2001, when the first such poll in Berwick-upon-Tweed resulted in a 74% No vote. Watford was the first council to vote in favour, doing so in July 2001 by a 52-48 margin; Croydon was the most recent council to establish a mayor, with an 80% Yes vote in October 2021. The highest Yes vote was 84% in Middlesbrough in 2001; the highest No vote was 81% in Guildford in 2016. The closest results were in Hartlepool and Lewisham, both of which voted 51% Yes in 2001. Ceredigion was the only Welsh council to hold a mayoral referendum, voting 73% No in 2004. Turnouts in these polls were often low, and in several cases the number of people who voted Yes in the poll was lower than the number of people who signed the petition that triggered it.

Overall, of the 54 previous mayoral referendums in England and Wales 17 have passed and 37 failed. Nine councils held further mayoral referendums after establishing their mayors, with five voting to retain the mayoralty and four (Stoke-on-Trent, Hartlepool, Torbay and Bristol) voting to abolish it. That leaves 13 current mayoralties, although this is not quite the same list as the 13 councils which originally voted in favour: Leicester, as stated, adopted its elected mayoralty without a referendum, while Copeland's elected mayoralty disappeared when Cumbria's local government was reorganised in 2023. (Liverpool both adopted and scrapped its elected mayor without a referendum.) Of the 13 current mayors, 9 are Labour, 2 Conservative (Bedford and Croydon), 1 Liberal Democrat (Watford) and 1 Aspire (Tower Hamlets).

We are now starting to get some more of the thinking of the current Westminster government on local government, with the publication last week of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill. This restores the Supplementary Vote runoff system for mayoral elections, reversing a change made by the last government, and this reform should ensure again that mayors are elected with the broad support from the electorate that they used to have. In council governance terms, the minority of councils which use the committee system will be required to adopt leader and cabinet models, which in particular overturns a change to the committee system which was adopted in Sheffield following a referendum in 2021.

And the mayoral referendum process will end: the 13 councils which currently have mayors can keep them, at least for the time being, but no new mayors of councils (as opposed to combined authority mayors) can be established. So today's mayoral referendum in Plymouth will, assuming that the Bill goes through, be the last of its kind. And the result of today's plebiscite is already looking like a dead letter: last month a ministerial order came out, cynically timed to come into force yesterday, which would ensure that a Yes vote in this referendum would not result in a mayoral election in Plymouth before May 2027. By that point, there might not be a Plymouth council at all.

On that rather depressing note, we'll turn to the ordinary business of this column by talking about local by-elections.

Pontypridd Town

Rhondda Cynon Taf council, South Wales; caused by the resignation of Plaid Cymru councillor Dawn Wood.

Three of today's local by-elections are in Wales, and we'll start there in the Valleys. The town of Pontypridd lies at the point where the River Rhondda flows into the Taff, and its name (from the Welsh pont y tŷ pridd meaning "bridge by the earthen house") refers to a number of bridges which have crossed the Taff here over the years.

One of these is the Old Bridge (or the New Bridge, as it was originally called), which was thrown over the river by William Edwards in 1756. The Old Bridge consisted of a single arch 140 feet wide, making it the longest single-span bridge in the UK at the time of its completion; however, the path over it was too narrow and steep even for the horse traffic of the day, and Edwards also made a large financial loss on its construction because his three previous bridges at this site had all collapsed. The Old Bridge still stands today as a footbridge, with road traffic carried by the parallel Victoria Bridge from 1857.

At the western end of the Old Bridge lie Pontypridd Library and the offices of the town council, which stand at the northern end of Ponty's main shopping street. This is the core of the Pontypridd Town ward, which lies in between the two rivers. Most of the ward's electors live in the Graigwen area to the north-west of the town centre.

Pontypridd has been the centre of its own parliamentary seat since 1918, and this seat has been in Labour hands since a by-election on 25th July 1922. This was one of the last examples of a ministerial by-election. Until 1926, being appointed to a Government job was seen as accepting an office of profit under the Crown, and the MPs involved thus lost their places in the Commons and had to get their seats back in by-elections shortly afterwards. Normally this was a formality, and in the period 1885 to 1926 only seven MPs who faced a ministerial by-election actually lost their seats. One of them was Winston Churchill, who was appointed to Asquith's first cabinet in 1908 as President of the Board of Trade and lost the resulting by-election in Manchester North West to the Conservatives; the Liberals then inserted Churchill straight into another by-election in Dundee, which he won. The last MP to lose a ministerial by-election was Thomas Lewis, the coalition Liberal MP for Pontypridd who was appointed in 1922 as a junior Lord of the Treasury but was defeated at the resulting by-election by Labour's Thomas Mardy Jones.

Mardy Jones' current successor as Labour MP for Pontypridd is Alex Davies-Jones, who has represented the seat since 2019; she is a junior frontbencher at the Ministry of Justice, with responsibility for victims. In the Senedd the Labour member for Pontypridd is Mick Antoniw, who was a solicitor before entering politics and served in the Welsh Cabinet under three First Ministers as counsel general for Wales; his resignation from that post in July 2024 brought down the short-lived Gething government.

Antoniw's Pontypridd constituency will be replaced for next year's Senedd election by a larger constituency of Pontypridd Cynon Merthyr, which will elect six MSs by proportional representation. This is a combination of the current Westminster constituencies of Pontypridd, and Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare. Aggregating the votes cast in 2024 in those constituencies would give three seats for Labour, two for Reform UK and one for Plaid Cymru.

This electoral reform removes the top-up system for Senedd elections, in which Mick Antoniw currently shares Pontypridd's representation with four regional MSs for South Wales Central: currently these are two Conservatives including the former Welsh party leader Andrew R T Davies and two Plaid Cymru MSs including Heledd Fychan. Fychan stepped up to the Senedd in 2021 after being elected in 2017 to Rhondda Cynon Taf council as the representative for Pontypridd Town. This is one of the least deprived wards in the Valleys - a large number of residents here work in public administration and the health sector - and it has often been closely fought between Labour and Plaid Cymru. (The Lib Dems did come through the middle here to win in 2008, but that was a long time ago.) Welsh local government law required Fychan to step down from Rhondda Cynon Taf council at the 2022 election, when her seat was held by new Plaid Cymru candidate Dawn Wood with a 54-36 lead over Labour.

Dawn Wood stepped down as a councillor in June on health grounds after being diagnosed with a brain tumour, and she had been absent from council meetings since December in consequence. As a result Plaid Cymru are defending the Pontypridd Town by-election with their candidate William Rees, who was the Plaid candidate for Pontypridd in the 2024 Westminster election and for Cardiff Central in the 2021 Senedd election; he gives an address in the ward and he currently works for the Plaid group in the Senedd. Labour, who hold a majority on Rhondda Cynon Taf council, have selected Elin Brown who is fighting her first election campaign: she is a Unison figure who works at the University of South Wales. Also on the ballot are Cerys Walker for the Conservatives, Jeffrey Baxter for the Green Party and Martin Roberts for Reform UK.

Westminster constituency: Pontypridd
Senedd constituency: Pontypridd
Senedd constituency (from next election): Pontypridd Cynon Merthyr
ONS Travel to Work Area: Cardiff
Postcode district: CF37

Jeffrey Baxter (Grn)
Elin Brown (Lab)
William Rees (PC)
Martin Roberts (RUK)
Cerys Walker (C)

May 2022 result PC 565 Lab 380 C 104
Previous results in detail

Baglan

Neath Port Talbot council, South Wales; caused by the death of Labour councillor Peter Richards.

Staying in Wales, the week's first Labour defence comes on the coast. The village of Baglan lies just to the north of Port Talbot on the steep slopes of the Mynydd y Gaer and the smaller Mynydd Dinas. The main communication links to Swansea - the M4 motorway, the South Wales main line, and the A48 road which the motorway replaced in 1994 - all pass through Baglan along the bottom edge of the hill.

Beyond the motorway and railway line lie the Baglan Moors, a relatively flat area next to the sea which is almost entirely given over to industry. In 1963 BP turned most of the moors into one of Europe's largest petrochemical sites, and in 1974 around 2,500 people were employed here. The BP plant closed in 2004 and the site was then redeveloped, with the construction of a large paper mill, a solar farm (which should be doing good business with the weather we've had this summer) and the Baglan Bay power station, a gas-fired plant which opened in 2004 with a generation capacity of 525 megawatts. A business park was built next to the power station to benefit from the cheap power generated by it; but then in 2020 the power station's parent company went bust and generation ceased. Beyond all this industry is the northern end of Aberavon Beach, which is noted for the quality of its surfing: look in the right direction from this beach, and there is no land between here and Brazil.

In Westminster elections Baglan is part of the Aberafan Maesteg constituency, which (under its previous name of Aberavon) has been in Labour hands continuously since 1922. Its first MP was the Labour Party leader/traitor (delete to taste) Ramsay MacDonald, who represented Aberavon during his first term as Prime Minister in 1924. The seat's current MP Stephen Kinnock is the son of the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock and husband of the former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt; he was elected in Aberafan Maesteg last year for his fourth term of office, and he is now a junior minister with the thorny portfolio of social care.

For now, Aberavon is still a constituency of its own in Senedd Cymru. Its MS since 2011 has been David Rees, who was elected for Labour but acts in the non-partisan role of Dirprwy Lywydd or Deputy Presiding Officer in the chamber at Cardiff Bay. Rees is to seek re-election next year in third place on the Labour list for Afan Ogwr Rhondda, behind the Ogmore MS Huw Irranca-Davies and the Rhondda MS Buffy Williams. In the 2024 Westminster elections Labour had enough votes in Afan Ogwr Rhondda for four out of six seats, with the other two split between Reform UK and Plaid Cymru.

Neath Port Talbot council is a rather different matter. Labour lost control here in 2022 after 26 years in office, winning 27 seats against 18 independent councillors, 12 Plaid Cymru, 2 Lib Dems and a Green; an coalition of independent and Plaid Cymru councillors is now running the council. In by-elections since 2022 Labour have gained a seat from an independent (in the neighbouring ward of Briton Ferry East), Plaid Cymru have lost a seat an independent and the Liberal Democrats have gained a seat from Labour.

Baglan has been in the Labour column since 2012, having previously voted for candidates of the now-defunct Neath Port Talbot Residents Association. In 2022 the Labour slate, which was guaranteed one of the ward's three seats due to insufficient opposition candidates standing, polled 54% with an independent finishing as runner-up on 30%.

Some years ago, one candidate who had stood in Baglan ward in the 2012 Neath Port Talbot election threatened me with the Information Commissioner and other legal action for having the temerity to list that candidacy on the Local Elections Archive Project website. For the record, LEAP operates within a specific exemption in the Data Protection Act 2018 for "archiving, historical and research purposes in the public interest", and I take the view that not even GDPR can completely erase from the public record the fact that you had previously appeared on a few thousand ballot papers. As such GDPR takedown requests will normally be refused as such, however I will action requests to block specific LEAP pages from search engines on a case-by-case basis.

Hopefully there will be no such shenanigans following the result of this by-election, which is to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Peter Richards in April. Richards was a long-serving councillor who had represented Baglan continuously since 2004: he was originally elected for the Neath Port Talbot Residents Association, but he had the Labour nomination since 2008.

The by-election to replace Richards has attracted a lot of interest with seven candidates standing - that's more than there were in the 2022 ordinary elections when three seats were up for grabs. At the bottom of the alphabetical ballot paper is the defending Labour candidate Josh Tuck, a small businessman who also does charity work with Childline and the NSPCC and was one of the organisers of Neath Port Talbot's first Pride event. Last time the only serious challenge to Labour here came from an independent candidate, and the independent challenge this time is led by Wendy Blethyn who is endorsed by the council's ruling independent group. Also on the ballot are Lee Stabbins for the Conservatives (who gives an address in faraway Ammanford), John Bamsey for Reform UK, Nigel Bartolotti Hill for the Greens (who gives an address in Swansea), Colin Deere for Plaid Cymru and Tomos Roberts-Young for the Lib Dems.

Westminster constituency: Aberafan Maesteg
Senedd constituency: Aberavon
Senedd constituency (from next election): Afan Ogwr Rhondda
ONS Travel to Work Area: Swansea
Postcode district: SA12

John Bamsey (RUK)
Nigel Bartolotti Hill (Grn)
Wendy Blethyn (Ind)
Colin Deere (PC)
Tomos Roberts-Young (LD)
Lee Stabbins (C)
Josh Tuck (Lab)

May 2022 result Lab 1390/1079/910 Ind 781 C 386
Previous results in detail

Prestatyn Central

Denbighshire council, North Wales; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Hugh Irving.

We now travel from Wales' south coast to the north coast. Earlier we noted how the name of Pontypridd came from the Welsh pont y tŷ pridd, with an unstressed syllable between two Ts in the middle having disappeared over time. A similar process happened in the many English locations whose name came from the Old English prēosta tūn, which referred to a priest's village or homestead; the unstressed syllable between two Ts in the middle disappeared over time, and we ended up with "Preston". But on the north coast of Wales this name evolved in a different direction: in the Welsh language words are stressed on the penultimate syllable, so prēostatūn became not "Preston" but "Prestatyn".

Sunny Prestatyn's location at the northern end of the Clwydian hills has historically meant that transport links through North Wales go through here (although the modern A55 road takes a higher and more southerly route). Central ward runs south from the town's railway station to take in some reminders of life in an earlier age: a modern housing estate in the south of the ward includes the excavated remains of a Roman bathhouse, while the hills overlooking the ward from the east (which are part of the Clwydian Range and Dee Valley National Landscape) include a number of caves and earthworks which go back into prehistory.

The local authority here is Denbighshire council, which is run by a coalition of Labour and Plaid Cymru: in the 2022 elections Labour won 19 seats against 12 independents, 8 Plaid Cymru councillors, 6 Conservatives, 2 Greens and 1 Lib Dem. Labour have since lost three by-elections to the Conservatives, two in Rhyl (which is the main source of Labour votes in the county) and one last October in the neighbouring ward of Prestatyn North.

Prestatyn Central doesn't traditionally have much of a Labour vote - it did return a Labour councillor in 2012, but that councillor was Peter Duffy who had previously been a long-serving independent councillor for the ward - and in recent years the ward has normally been inclined towards independent and Conservative candidates. So it must have been a bit of a shock for the local Conservatives in 2022 when they lost one of the ward's seats resoundingly to the Green Party, and held the other one by just one vote over Labour. Shares of the vote here were 49% for the Greens, 24% for the Conservatives and 23% for Labour.

This Green surge didn't transfer to the 2024 Westminster elections, when the Clwyd East constituency which includes Prestatyn returned Labour MP Becky Gittins for her first term of office. She defeated two previous Conservative MPs, the party's official candidate James Davies (who finished second) and independent candidate Rob Roberts, who had been thrown out of the Conservative party for sexual misconduct and only escaped a recall petition thanks to a now-closed loophole in the process. James Davies was previously the MP for Vale of Clwyd, which was the only Conservative gain from Labour at the 2021 Senedd elections; that seat's MS is Gareth Davies, who is the Welsh Conservatives' spokesman for culture, tourism, sport and North Wales. For the 2026 Senedd election Prestatyn will be part of the Clwyd constituency, which on the basis of the 2024 Westminster votes would have returned three Labour MSs, two Conservatives and one for Reform UK.

As stated the Conservatives have done well in Denbighshire by-elections in this term, but the party now needs to turn from attack to defence following the death of Hugh Irving in April. Irving had represented Prestatyn Central ward on Denbighshire council since 2012 and he had previously been mayor of Prestatyn. Away from politics, he ran a menswear store in the town for many years.

Defending this seat for the Conservatives is Ben Williams, who already represents this ward on Prestatyn town council and is now seeking to step up to county level. The Green Party, whose lead candidate Jon Harland had a big lead here in 2022, will be hoping to win a second seat with their nominee Jason Sanders. Labour, who were one vote away from winning a seat here in 2022, have selected retired drayman Christopher Crompton. Also standing on a long and all-male ballot paper are independent candidate Peter Duffy (who represents this ward on the town council and was an independent and then Labour county councillor for this ward until 2017), Chris Brown for the Lib Dems, Paul Penlington whose long and winding political career included previously contesting this ward for the Lib Dems in 2008 but who now has the Plaid Cymru nomination, and Tony Thomas (who will not be helped by having "address in Conwy" next to his name on the ballot paper) for Reform UK.

Westminster constituency: Clwyd East
Senedd Cymru constituency: Vale of Clwyd
Senedd constituency (from next election): Clwyd
ONS Travel to Work Area: Rhyl
Postcode district: LL19

Chris Brown (LD)
Christopher Crompton (Lab)
Peter Duffy (Ind)
Paul Penlington (PC)
Jason Sanders (Grn)
Tony Thomas (RUK)
Ben Williams (C)

May 2022 result Grn 806/289 C 387/328 Lab 386 Ind 64
Previous results in detail

Sefton Park

Liverpool council, Merseyside; caused by the resignation of Green Party councillor John Howard.

This week's big city by-election comes in Liverpool, where we visit the city's largest public park. Named after the Earls of Sefton, from whom Liverpool Corporation purchased the land for £250,000, Sefton Park opened to the city's public in 1872 to a design by the Frenchman Édouard André, who made his name as a landscape architect off the back of this and went on to design public and private parks all over the world.

Features of the park include a large glass Palm House, a replica of the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain from London's Piccadilly Circus, and a bandstand which may have inspired some of the imagery for the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The residents of Sefton Park ward live between the park and Aigburth Road, in between the urban deprivation of Toxteth to the west and the middle-class suburbs of Aigburth and Mossley Hill to the east. It's with the latter that Sefton Park ward is paired for Parliamentary purposes, as part of the Liverpool Wavertree constituency which in 2024 returned Labour MP Paula Barker for her second term of office. Barker had taken the seat over in 2019 from the retiring Luciana Berger, who was one of the Labour MPs to defect to Change UK and had eventually ended up in the Lib Dems.

At the time of the 2021 census this area was part of St Michael's ward, which had the highest number of residents working in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector of any ward in north-west England (5.0%). In local elections this ward had long been the Liverpool stronghold of the Green Party, who displaced the Lib Dems in the 2000s as the anti-Labour vote here; the Green strength meant that St Michael's was the only Liverpool ward which Labour never won in the period 2004 to 2021. Sefton Park ward has so far carried on this political tradition, as at its first contest in 2023 the ward had a Green Party lead of 57-34 over Labour.

This by-election is to replace the Green Party councillor John Howard, who had served since that 2023 election. Howard was previously a scientist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, researching the resistance of mosquitoes to insecticide. He has now resigned from the council as he is moving away from the city to take up a new job.

Defending this seat for the Greens is Katie Jarman, who stood in a Liverpool by-election last year in the less promising territory of Fazakerley North ward; she should get a better result this time. The Labour candidate Connor Campbell is fighting his first election campaign. Also on the ballot are Tristan Paul for the Lib Dems, French-born Marc d'Abbadie for the Conservatives who must be hoping that the electorate vote blue d'Abbadie, and Harry Gallimore-King who has previously stood in Liverpool council elections for the Greens and the Conservatives and now has the Reform UK nomination.

Parliamentary constituency: Liverpool Wavertree (nearly all), Liverpool Riverside (small part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Liverpool
Postcode districts: L8, L17

Connor Campbell (Lab)
Marc d'Abbadie (C)
Harry Gallimore-King (RUK)
Katie Jarman (Grn)
Tristan Paul (LD)

May 2023 result Grn 760 Lab 449 LD 69 C 60
Previous results in detail

Eccleshall and Gnosall

Staffordshire county council; caused by the resignation of Reform UK councillor Wayne Titley.

Two weeks ago we had the first council by-elections defended by Reform UK, to replace councillors who either resigned within a few days of their election or weren't eligible to stand in the first place. Reform UK lost both of those seats, so we are still yet to see an RUK hold in a local by-election. Here's another chance.

"Eccles" is an old Celtic word for a church - compare the Latin "ecclesia", the French "église" and the Welsh "eglwys" - so it's appropriate that Eccleshall, a small market town in western Staffordshire, should have ecclesiastical connections. Until the mid-19th century Eccleshall Castle was the palace of the bishops of Lichfield, several of whom lie in eternal rest at Holy Trinity Church in the town. The castle was occupied by the Lancastrian queen Margaret of Anjou during the defeat of her forces at the nearby battle of Blore Heath in 1459, and it fell to the Parliamentary forces in a 1643 siege during the Civil War. The present Eccleshall Castle is a new house built in 1693 among the ruins of the old castle, and this house is now a private residence.

The Bishops of Lichfield had their palace here because in mediaeval times Eccleshall was roughly equidistant from and had good road links to Lichfield, Coventry and Chester. However, the Industrial Revolution mostly passed the town by and the main communication links from the Midlands to the north now do likewise. The Shropshire Union Canal runs to the south-west of Eccleshall through the villages of Gnosall (on the main road from Stafford to Telford) and Woodseaves. The West Coast main line runs to the east through Norton Bridge, a junction which has been significantly upgraded in recent years but where the railway station closed in 2004. Northbound travellers on the M6 motorway might stop for a rest at Stafford North service area within the boundary of this county division, but there is no exit to the outside world here.

The current residents of Eccleshall and Gnosall (pronounced NO-s'l, the G is silent) include a large number of economically inactive people. Here we find HMP Drake Hall, a women's prison and young offenders' institution which houses around 350 prisoners. The Drake Hall buildings had originally been built during the Second World War for female workers at ROF Swynnerton, a munitions factory next to the West Coast main line: this site is still in MoD hands as Swynnerton Training Camp, and it now houses a number of Afghan refugees who had worked on the UK mission in Afghanistan. The prisoners and the Afghans are not eligible to vote in this election.

The Eccleshall and Gnosall county division covers nine rural parishes on the western edge of Staffordshire. It's a brand-new unit drawn up for the 2025 Staffordshire county elections in countryside which had previously been true blue, but where the once-strong Conservative vote was slipping. The local authority here is Stafford council, where the Conservatives lost control thanks to defections in 2022 and then performed very poorly in the 2023 election: this included losing one of the two seats in Gnosall and Woodseaves ward and both seats in Seighford and Church Eaton ward (which covers a small corner of this division) to the Green Party, although the Conservatives would still have carried this division thanks to a big lead in Eccleshall ward. Boundary changes for the 2024 Westminster election transferred this area into the Stafford parliamentary seat, which was a Labour gain last year: it's represented by Leigh Ingham, who was so confident of victory that she resigned her seat on South Gloucestershire council in advance of the general election.

Since 2009 Staffordshire county council has tended to have outsize majorities for the right. This normally means the Conservatives, but in May that meant Reform UK had their biggest win of the 2025 elections in terms of the percentage of seats available: the new Staffordshire county council has 49 Reform UK councillors against 10 Conservatives and three others (one seat each for Labour, the Greens and the Stafford Borough Independents). The Reform UK total of 49 includes the new Eccleshall and Gnosall county division, where Wayne Titley was elected by just 27 votes over the Conservatives, with shares of the vote at 35% for RUK, 34% for the Conservatives and 19% for the Green Party. Titley submitted his resignation within two weeks of his election, officially for personal reasons, following controversy over his social media.

Defending for Reform UK is Ray Barron, a former Conservative Stafford councillor who lost his seat in Weeping Cross and Wildwood ward as a Stafford Borough Independent candidate in 2023; his wife Jenny is the mayor of Stafford for this year. In May Ray Barron was an unsuccessful candidate for Stafford South East division. The Conservatives have selected Jeremy Pert, who is the leader of their group on Stafford council where he represents Eccleshall ward; Pert was the county councillor for Eccleshall from 2017 to 2025, and he is seeking to make a quick return to the county council after narrowly losing his seat to Titley in May. Also back from May's election and seeking to double up at county and borough level is the Green Party's Scott Spencer, a consultant geologist who represents Gnosall and Woodseaves ward on Stafford council: he was the Greens' parliamentary candidate for Stafford last year. Leah Elston-Thompson, for Labour, is the only other candidate to come forward.

Parliamentary constituency: Stafford
Stafford council wards: Eccleshall, Gnosall and Woodseaves, Seighford and Church Eaton (part: Ellenhall parish)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Stafford
Postcode districts: ST15, ST20, ST21, TF9, TF10

Ray Barron (RUK)
Leah Elston-Thompson (Lab)
Jeremy Pert (C)
Scott Spencer (Grn)

May 2025 result RUK 1584 C 1557 Grn 863 Lab 342 LD 187
Previous results in detail

Market Harborough - Logan

Harborough council, Leicestershire; caused by the death of Liberal Democrat councillor Barbara Johnson.

We now travel west from Staffordshire to reach Market Harborough which is, you might be surprised to hear given its name, an market town. It's on the main railway line from Leicester to London, and it once lay on the border between Leicestershire and Northamptonshire before a nineteenth-century reform placed the town solely within Leicestershire.

Market Harborough was once a major population centre for Rockingham Forest, which is mostly part of Northamptonshire. Mediaeval forests were not necessarily full of trees but were instead areas set aside for hunting; and this was still a major contributor to the local economy well into the nineteenth century, when Market Harborough was a foxhunting centre. The National Hunt Chase, one of the horseraces from which the modern Cheltenham Festival grew, was first run in 1860 over the local countryside.

One famous nineteenth-century resident of Market Harborough was one Thomas Cook, who in 1841 was working as a wood-turner and was active in the temperance movement. On 5th July 1841, shortly before he moved to nearby Leicester, Cook organised a rail excursion from Leicester to Loughborough to allow members of the Leicester Temperance Society to attend a meeting. Thus was born what was, until it went bust in 2019, one of the world's great travel companies.

In modern times a major employer in the town is Harborough council, which was one of many district councils where the Conservatives lost control in 2023. They are still the largest party on the council, but the 2023 election returned 15 Conservatives against 13 Lib Dems, 3 Labour and 3 Green councillors; a traffic-light coalition was formed under a Lib Dem leader.

This places Market Harborough - Logan ward, which covers the north-west quadrant of the town, within the council majority. The ward split its two councillors between the Conservatives and Lib Dems from 2007 to 2019 when there were major boundary changes, and since then the Liberal Democrats have had it all their own way here including in a previous by-election in September 2022. Shares of the vote here in 2023 were 47% for the Liberal Democrats, 27% for the Conservatives and 12% for Labour.

In 2024 the East Midlands region didn't return a single Lib Dem MP, and it appears that the party have given up on the Harborough constituency which was for many years seen as one of their best prospects in the region. Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (as the seat was renamed for the 2024 general election) has been in Conservative hands since 1950, and the challenge to re-elected Conservative MP Neil O'Brien here last year came from Labour with the Lib Dems finishing fourth behind Reform UK. O'Brien is now a shadow education minister.

Market Harborough - Logan is split between the two Market Harborough divisions of Leicestershire county council, both of which combine half of the town with adjacent rural areas. In 2025 Market Harborough East was a Lib Dem gain from the Conservatives, who held Market Harborough West and Foxton on a freak vote split with less than 25% of the vote; the Conservative county councillor finished 19 votes ahead of the Greens and 84 votes ahead of Reform UK. RUK did well enough elsewhere in Leicestershire to finish as the largest party on a hung council, and they have formed a minority administration.

Those polls came a week after the death of Harborough councillor Barbara Johnson at the age of 82. Following a career in education, Johnson had entered politics in 2007 as a councillor for Market Harborough - Great Bowden and Arden ward; she lost her seat there in 2015 but returned in 2019 as a councillor for Market Harborough - Logan, which she had represented since then.

So the Liberal Democrats have the job of defending this by-election. This defence falls to Roger Dunton, a long-serving former Harborough councillor who represented Market Harborough - Welland ward from 1987 until he lost his seat to the Green Party in 2023. Dunton also served the town as a firefighter for thirty years, and in the 2020 Birthday Honours he was appointed MBE for services to the community in Market Harborough. Another former Harborough councillor who was defeated two years ago and is seeking to return is the Conservatives' Paul Bremner, who was previously a councillor for this ward (under different boundaries) from 2007 to 2015 and then represented Lubenham ward from 2019 to 2023; Bremner was also the county councillor for Market Harborough West and Foxton from 2017 to 2021, and in his day job he is an associate professor at De Montfort University specialising in pharmaceutical and cosmetic science. The Labour candidate is Bridget Fitzpatrick, who was an unsuccessful candidate for the county council two months ago when she contested East Wigston. Also on the ballot paper are Jake Bolton for the Green Party; independent candidate Robin Lambert who regularly contests this ward and who was previously the SDP candidate for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston last year; Jonny Austin of Reform UK, who stood unsuccessfully in Gartree division at the county elections in May; and Peter Whalen who has the nomination of the Communist Party of Britain.

Parliamentary constituency: Harborough, Oadby and Wigston
Leicestershire county council division: Market Harborough East (part), Market Harborough West and Foxton (part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Leicester
Postcode district: LE16

Jonny Austin (RUK)
Jake Bolton (Grn)
Paul Bremner (C)
Roger Dunton (LD)
Bridget Fitzpatrick (Lab)
Robin Lambert (Ind)
Peter Whalen (Communist)

May 2023 result LD 804/706 C 467/343 Lab 213/172 Grn 132/111 Ind 95
September 2022 by-election LD 582 C 382 Lab 250 Ind 60
May 2019 result LD 774/635 C 587 Grn 389 Ind 242 Lab 198
Previous results in detail

St Martin's

Basildon council, Essex; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Maryam Yaqub.

We now travel south from an old town to a New Town. Basildon is mentioned in the Domesday survey of 1086, but it wasn't until 1949 that it was designated as one of the first wave of New Towns to be built after the Second World War. A decade later housebuilding was well advanced, with residents moving into the Barstable area which lies east of the town centre and takes its name from an ancient Hundred of Essex. In 1957 the old Duke of Gloucester officially opened Gloucester Park to the north of the town centre, while in 1962 the brutalist 14-storey Brooke House - named after the future Home Secretary Henry Brooke who was at the time Macmillan's local government minister - was completed on the East Square in the town centre. To serve the residents of Brooke House and elsewhere in Basildon, in 1962 the Bishop of Chelmsford consecrated a brand-new church in the town centre which is dedicated to St Martin of Tours.

To mark the Millennium, in 1999 St Martin's gained its own belltower, a freestanding structure with a height of 30 metres. Many of its bells are ancient, coming here second-hand from a redundant church in Colchester; this includes the tenor bell which was cast by one Joanna Hille in 1441 and was the first bell in the world known to be made by a woman. These centuries-old instruments are housed in a structure which is unmistakeably modern: St Martin's, Basildon has the UK's, and possibly the world's, only belltower made of steel and glass.

Next to St Martin's church is the Basildon Centre, the home of Basildon council and its minority Labour administration. Basildon has a whole-council election on new ward boundaries in May 2024 at which the Conservatives lost control of the town: Labour ended up as the largest party with 18 seats, against 13 Conservatives, 6 independents and 5 Wickford Independents. One of the Wickford Independents councillors has since died, and Reform UK won the resulting by-election in Wickford Park ward last month.

The Labour win of May 2024 was not repeated at parliamentary level two months later, although it could have been very close. St Martin's ward is part of the Basildon and Billericay constituency which turned in one of the closest results of the 2024 general election: the Conservative party chairman Richard Holden, who did the chicken-run here after his previous North West Durham seat disappeared in boundary changes, was elected just 20 votes ahead of the Labour candidate with Reform UK not far behind either of them. (There will also have been a lot of nailbiting by the Green Party candidate, who saved his deposit by 17 votes in the final reckoning.)

On the far side of the railway line, two full recounts in the South Basildon and East Thurrock constituency meant that that seat was the last in England to declare its result in July 2024. It was another Labour near-miss, with the party finishing 98 votes short of gaining the South Basildon and East Thurrock constituency from the Conservatives. Instead this seat ended up becoming one of just four constituencies in 2024 to return a Reform UK MP, with James McMurdock winning. He quit Reform UK earlier this month following a Times investigation into Bounce Back Loans totalling £70,000 which he had claimed from the government during the Covid-19 pandemic, and he is currently sitting as an independent MP.

St Martin's is one of the strongest Labour wards in Basildon and has only been lost by the party once this century, to the Conservatives in 2021. One reason for this record is that the pre-2024 version of this ward was smaller and only had two councillors, and it wasn't up for election in 2014 when UKIP swept the board in Basildon town. The ward is part of the large Basildon Pitsea division of Essex county council, which split its two seats in 2021 between the Conservatives' Luke Mackenzie and Labour's Aidan McGurran (a former managing editor of Mirror Group Newspapers); but Mackenzie died last year, and the resulting by-election on general election day was gained by Labour candidate Emma Callaghan. She is married to the Labour leader of Basildon council Gavin Callaghan, who was elected at the top of the poll in St Martin's ward in May 2024; overall the Labour slate won the ward with 38% of the vote, against 21% for the Conservatives, 12% for the Greens and 12% for an independent candidate.

The voters of St Martin's ward are now back at the polls following the resignation of Maryam Yaqub, who had served the ward since 2019 and had been leader of Basildon council's Labour group going into the 2024 election. To defend her seat Labour have selected Elizabeth Atkinson, who is fighting her first election campaign. The Conservatives have reselected Deepak Roy who stood here last year: he is described by the party as "the CEO of an IT consultancy, with a particular interest in the development of Artificial Intelligence tools to help the visually impaired". Another returning candidate from 2024 is the Greens' Ellie Matthewman, who works in the software industry. Simon Breedon, who finished just below Matthewman here last year as an independent candidate, went on to be the Social Democratic Party candidate for South Basildon and East Thurrock in the general election and he is standing here with their nomination. Also on the ballot are Michael Chandler for the Lib Dems, Andrew Buxton (a former Labour councillor for this ward) for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, and Reform UK's Sam Journet who runs a jeweller's here in the town centre.

Parliamentary constituency: Basildon and Billericay
Essex county council division: Basildon Pitsea
ONS Travel to Work Area: Southend
Postcode districts: SS13, SS14, SS15, SS16

Elizabeth Atkinson (Lab)
Simon Breedon (SDP)
Andrew Buxton (TUSC)
Michael Chandler (LD)
Sam Journet (RUK)
Ellie Matthewman (Grn)
Deepak Roy (C)

May 2024 result Lab 990/865/820 C 532/514 Grn 319 Ind 305 LD 243 TUSC 190
Previous results in detail

Maypole and Leyton Cross; and
Stone House

Dartford council, Kent; caused respectively by the resignations of Conservative councillors Kyle Stealey and Tom Oliver.

We finish for the week on the Kent side of the Thames estuary, and not far to the south of it. Until the Lower Thames Crossing finally gets built, the last possible fixed crossing-point of the Thames estuary is at Dartford, via the Queen Elizabeth II bridge for clockwise traffic and the Dartford Tunnels for anticlockwise traffic. The clockwise and anticlockwise directions here refer to the M25 motorway, but the Dartford Crossing and the approach road through urban Dartford to the south is not in fact part of the M25; it's an all-purpose road, with the number A282.

Traffic descending from the Queen Elizabeth II bridge will land within the parish of Stone, which covers industrial and residential areas together with the large Bluewater shopping centre. Most of these are in the Stone Castle ward, whereas we are concerned with Stone House ward which covers the south-west corner of Stone parish and associated parts of Dartford to the east of the M25 A282 between junctions 1A and 1B. (The Stone parish boundary is a real mess here, jagging through houses seemingly at random.)

Some of this development was on a site previously occupied by the City of London Lunatic Asylum, which treated psychiatric patients here from 1866 to 2005. Among that hospital's inmates was the poet and composer Ivor Gurney, who died here in 1937. Also here was the site of Dartford FC's former ground on Watling Street, which hosted League football from 1989 when Maidstone United groundshared here. Maidstone United then went bust in 1992, and their demise also forced Dartford into bankruptcy: the non-league club had had to pay £500,000 to buy the ground improvements from Maidstone's liquidators with no way of servicing the resulting debt. The Watling Street ground was immediately sold to developers to pay Dartford FC's creditors and redeveloped for housing; once Dartford FC got back on their feet they spent 14 years groundsharing with other clubs before moving into their new council-funded stadium at Princes Park.

The old Watling Street football ground was on the original Roman Road from the Kent ports to Londinium, but Watling Street has now been replaced as a London arterial road by the modern A2 bypass to the south of Dartford. This newer road passes the village of Maypole just outside the Greater London boundary, which has grown strongly in population during this century as a result of the development for housing of another psychiatric hospital: that was the Bexley Mental Hospital, which operated from 1898 to 2001. Maypole is separated by heathland from the rather older village of Leyton Cross and a series of secondary schools, the boys' and girls' Wilmington Grammar Schools and the comprehensive Wilmington Academy.

Both of these are wards of Dartford council, where at borough level it's as if the Conservative collapse we have seen across the country in recent years has never happened. Dartford council has had a Conservative majority since 2007, and following the 2023 borough elections the ruling Conservative group was unchanged in strength at 29 out of 42 seats: the opposition councillors were 11 Labour, 1 Green and 1 councillor from the Swanscombe and Greenhithe Residents Association. The Residents councillor died last year and Reform UK won the resulting by-election in Greenhithe and Knockhall ward.

This column previously covered Maypole and Leyton Cross ward in January 2022, following the death of long-serving Conservative councillor Ann Allen. She had a very safe seat, and the new Conservative candidate Kyle Stealey had no trouble holding the resulting by-election with a 63-14 lead over the Green Party. The 2023 election here was a straight fight between the Conservatives and Labour, with Stealey being re-elected by 69-31. Stone House ward has been more closely fought, and in both 2019 and 2023 it split its two seats between the Conservatives and Labour; in votes the Conservatives led here in 2023 by 49-41.

The Dartford constituency is one of the longest-standing bellwethers in UK politics, having voted for the winning party at every general election from 1964 to date. As such it was a narrow Labour gain last year for Jim Dickson, a former leader of Lambeth council, which must have left the Conservatives cursing boundary changes which had taken a strongly-Conservative ward out of the seat.

Then in the 2025 Kent county council election the electoral pendulum swung in a third direction, with Reform UK following up their by-election gain in Swanscombe and Greenhithe to win all six of Dartford's seats on Kent county council. Maypole and Leyton Cross ward is part of the Wilmington county division which was gained from the Conservatives, while Stone Cross is split between Dartford East (gained from the Conservatives) and Dartford North East (gained from Labour).

So the Dartford Conservatives might be a bit more worried than previously about these by-elections to replace two resigning councillors. The Stone House by-election is to replace Tom Oliver, who had served that ward since 2019; in Maypole and Leyton Cross the vacant seat has been left behind by the 2022 by-election winner Kyle Stealey. No reasons were publicly disclosed for their resignations, but it appears that Stealey has taken up a new job in Grimsby.

The latest Maypole and Leyton Cross by-election is defended for the Conservatives by Campbell Steven, who is a management consultant. He is fighting his first election campaign as is his Labour opponent David Johnson-Lang. The Greens' Lewis Glynn and Reform UK's Stephen Ridley also stand.

Finally, in Stone House ward the Conservatives have reselected Milan Suter: he a civil engineer and Stone parish councillor who was their unsuccessful candidate here in 2023. Labour's Suneetha Giridhar is fighting her first election campaign. The Greens' Julian Hood is straight back on the campaign trail after contesting Dartford East in May's county elections, while Reform UK join the fray with their candidate James Buchan.

Next week we have seven polls to bring you in what will be the last busy week of local by-elections before the traditional August lull. Stay tuned for those.

Maypole and Leyton Cross

Parliamentary constituency: Dartford
Kent county council division: Wilmington
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: DA2, DA5

Lewis Glynn (Grn)
David Johnson-Lang (Lab)
Stephen Ridley (RUK)
Campbell Steven (C)

May 2023 result C 435 Lab 198
January 2022 by-election C 334 Grn 76 Lab 65 LD 54
May 2019 result C 474 Lab 89
Previous results in detail

Stone House

Parliamentary constituency: Dartford
Kent county council division: Dartford East (part), Dartford North East (psrt)
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode district: DA2

James Buchan (RUK)
Suneetha Giridhar (Lab)
Julian Hood (Grn)
Milan Suter (C)

May 2023 result C 667/535 Lab 556/491 Grn 125
May 2019 result Lab 559/447 C 518/487 UKIP 186
Previous results in detail

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Andrew Teale