LOCAL ELECTIONS HANDBOOK 2008 Colin Rallings & Michael Thrasher LOCAL ELECTIONS HANDBOOK 2008 The 2008 Local Election Results Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher with the assistance of Galina Borisyuk, Brian Cheal, Dawn Cole, Elena Long and Lawrence Ware Local Government Chronicle Elections Centre University of Plymouth Local Elections Handbook 2008 © Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers. Published by the Local Government Chronicle Elections Centre, University of Plymouth, Plymouth PL4 8AA ISBN 978-0-948858-43-7 Distributed by: LGC Information, Greater London House, Hampstead Road, London, NW1 7EJ Table of Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... v Introduction ..................................................................................................... vii Using the Handbook .......................................................................................xix Aggregate Statistics for Local Authorities ......................................................... 1 London Mayor and Assembly Election Results .............................................. 11 Metropolitan Borough Council Election Results ............................................. 29 Unitary Council Election Results .................................................................... 61 Shire District Council Election Results .......................................................... 83 Welsh Unitary Council Election Results ...................................................... 127 Appendix ...................................................................................................... 159 Acknowledgements We would like, as always, to acknowledge the response by Electoral Administrators to our requests for information, which now extends to cover data on postal ballots, spoilt papers etc. As our demands grow we hope that more local authorities take advantage of our offer to provide free of charge a detailed record of our data holdings from 1973 onwards for their particular authority. There should also be a special mention for the team at London Elects, their provision of electoral data sets new standards in the field and we welcome their innovations and comprehensiveness. Our thanks also go to the Electoral Commission, which provided support for our data collection, principally that concerning the numbers for postal and in person voting. Each handbook requires a great deal of work from a team based here in Plymouth. Our gratitude to them as always. Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher November 2008. v vi Introduction Local elections took place in England and Wales on May 1st, 2008. The London mayor and assembly election dominated media coverage, with the incumbent Ken Livingstone seeking a third consecutive term, but across the rest of England, a total of 137 local authorities held elections. These comprised 36 metropolitan boroughs, 78 shire districts, 19 unitary councils and a further four ‘shadow’ councils in newly established unitary areas. Most of these authorities were electing a fraction of the seats although whole council elections took place in a number that were either implementing ward boundary changes or new structures. All 22 local authorities in Wales held whole council elections. About a third of local authorities joined the growing band that prefers to organise the count on the day following rather than overnight. The last election to declare was that for London mayor and assembly, announced shortly before midnight on Friday May 2. Although the London Assembly has just 25 elected members, elsewhere more than 4,100 council seats in 3,400 wards were at stake, around a third located in Wales and a slightly smaller percentage than that in the shires. Generally, these council seats were last fought in June 2004 after the elections were postponed from May to coincide with those for the European Parliament. Then, Labour suffered a backlash from its policy on Iraq and the Conservatives advanced at the expense also of the Liberal Democrats. Prior to the campaign it seemed that Labour’s previous performance had been so bad (the worst since the late 1960s) that a further setback was unlikely and that the Conservatives would find it difficult to make progress. However, Gordon Brown’s decision in his last budget before becoming Prime Minister to abolish the 10p in the pound tax rate, combined with rapidly rising fuel and food prices, meant the electoral mood turned further against Labour. A strong Conservative showing was confirmed when Boris Johnson ousted Livingstone from the post of London mayor. Labour’s misery was complete and the party made no attempt to disguise the severity of its losses. Our estimate of the national equivalent vote placed the Conservatives on 43%, three points higher than in 2007, Labour on 24% (down two points) and in third place the Liberal Democrats on 23% (down one point). Inevitably, given boundary changes, estimating precisely the number of seats being defended by each party added some element of uncertainty to the post-election analysis. In our view, media reports under-estimated the overall scale of gains and losses. Despite its already high base the Conservatives made a net gain of around 300 seats, Labour recorded net losses of more than 400 seats with the Liberal Democrats finishing marginally ahead of where they had started. Further gains vii were made by candidates standing for a range of minor parties, principally the Greens, while in Wales, Plaid Cymru made a net gain of 31 seats. Table 1 is a summary of the state of the parties in local councils and seats. Across England there are now more Conservative councillors than Labour and Liberal Democrats combined while the party currently holds 44% of council seats in Great Britain. Almost half of the councils in Britain are under Conservative control. A total of 34 councils (one in five) underwent some change in political control (Table 2). The Conservatives added a further nine authorities with Labour losing control in 10. A notable gain for the Conservatives was the metropolitan borough of Bury (visited on Friday by David Cameron), which it last controlled at the height of the Thatcher era. There were further advances in other boroughs, including Birmingham, Oldham, North Tyneside, Salford and Sunderland. Across all 36 boroughs the Conservatives only narrowly missed out-polling Labour (Table 3) giving the party further encouragement that it is moving beyond its electoral base in southern England. Other noteworthy Conservative successes came in Nuneaton and Bedworth, Labour controlled since 1973, Harlow, Southampton and Redditch, whose parliamentary seat is currently held by the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith. The capture of the Vale of Glamorgan (again, warranting a visit from the busy party leader) doubled the number of Welsh councils under its control. Although Labour gained enough seats to take control in Slough, it lost control of Hartlepool, Reading and Wolverhampton as well as a clutch of authorities in Wales, including Blaenau Gwent where the party has suffered from internal divisions. In Cardiff the party now lies in third place, a far cry from 1999 when it controlled 50 seats there. Liberal Democrats lost control of Liverpool and Pendle although in the former it then re-claimed control when an Independent Labour councillor was swiftly recruited to the cause. By contrast, the victories in Burnley, Sheffield and St. Albans were rather more conventional. Almost seven million votes were cast and more than one in three went to Conservative candidates, a quarter was cast for Labour and a fifth for the Liberal Democrats. Almost one in five voters supported either an Independent candidate or favoured one of a multitude of minor parties. Eight in ten wards featured a candidate from one of the two main parties with the Liberal Democrats contesting just five hundred fewer. One in five wards was fought by the Green party. In Wales, Plaid Cymru contested more wards than did both Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. Some measure of the scale of Labour’s decline (and Conservative recovery) is voting in the metropolitan boroughs. This is always a good point of comparison because of the repeating and symmetrical electoral cycle in these authorities. Fewer than nine thousand votes separated the two parties, a gap that might have been narrower had the Conservatives contested as many wards. In 2004 the Conservatives were seven percentage points behind Labour and won seventy fewer wards. Labour’s vote continues to be better distributed, however, winning 8% more wards and finishing seventy seats ahead of its rival. Nevertheless, the Conservative party now finds itself in a much stronger position to challenge Labour in its heartland. In Walsall an absolute majority of voters chose Conservative candidates and in another eight boroughs more than four in ten votes were cast in the party’s favour. The electoral advantage moves to the Conservatives in the shire districts. Here, the party won 46% of votes and 58% of the seats while Labour struggled to finish behind the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats’ performance across the different types of local authority confounds the often expected fate for a third party under first past the