Previewing the council by-elections of 12th May 2022

“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”

Two by-elections on Thursday 12th May 2022, both Conservative defences in south-east England — an area where the party didn’t do that well last week. Read on…

Peacehaven West

Lewes council, East Sussex; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Joe Miller.

So, the May 2022 local elections are over and it’s back to the diet of local by-elections; however, the first by-election Andrew’s Previews will cover in the 2022–23 municipal year is really a continuation of themes from last week.

In a rather literal sense, this week’s column is starting from zero. Peacehaven is the location where the Greenwich Meridian, the line of zero degrees longuitude, leaves the UK to cross the English Channel towards France and beyond. There is an obelisk here to mark the point where the Eastern and Western hemispheres meet; however, coastal erosion means that it has had to be relocated twice to date.

The town of Peacehaven owes its existence to the inspiration of one man. His name was Charles Neville, and he had bought a large amount of land in what was then the parish of Piddinghoe. In 1916 Neville took adverts out in all the national newspapers for a competition to name a new town to be developed on the south coast between Brighton and Newhaven, with prize money of £2,600 for the winning entry and free plots of land in the town for the runners-up.

The winning entry in the competition was “New Anzac-on-Sea”, a tribute to the ANZAC soldiers in the First World War who were stationed nearby and who had sustained such heavy losses in the Gallipoli campaign the previous year. Mr West, of Ilford in Essex, and Mr Kemp, of Maidstone in Kent, were named as the winners. You will have noticed that this name didn’t stick. The competition led to some controversy, particularly over the runner-up prizes: Neville was only prepared to release the “free” plots of land to the winners upon payment of conveyancing fees. The Daily Express decried this as a scam, and backed that up in court by successfully suing Neville. Perhaps in a bid to distract from this legal trouble, in February 1917 Neville unilaterally changed the name of the town to “Peacehaven”, a call for peace as the First World War raged on.

From these inauspicious beginnings a century ago Peacehaven has grown into a proper town, next to the South Coast clifftops. It was developed on American lines with a grid system of streets, which is broken in West ward by Meridian Park and the town’s secondary school, Peacehaven Community School.

Peacehaven is part of the Lewes local government district, where the Conservatives are the largest party; however, they lost their majority at the 2019 election, the first to feature the current ward boundaries. The Conservatives won both seats in Peacehaven West ward three years ago on a freakishly low vote share: they had just 26% of the vote against 21% for an independent candidate, 18% each for UKIP and the Greens and 17% for the Liberal Democrats. Joe Miller topped the poll; following the 2019 election he briefly became deputy leader of Lewes council, but the Conservative minority administration was ousted shortly afterwards after all the other parties on the council eventually agreed a coalition deal.

Miller already had local government experience. He had been elected to neighbouring Brighton and Hove council in 2015 and was re-elected there in 2019, serving on both councils simultaneously. At the December 2019 general election Miller was the Conservative candidate for the Brighton Kemptown constituency, which covers both Peacehaven and his Brighton ward; he secured a small swing to the Conservatives, but Brighton Kemptown has swung strongly to the left over the last decade and is now a safe Labour constituency.

Joe Miller resigned both his council seats in March for personal reasons. As this column reported last week, he cited that he was getting married, was moving away from the area and wanted to concentrate on his consultancy business. He denied that his resignations were connected to a drink-driving charge for which he is currently awaiting trial.

So far this double resignation has led to one Conservative loss. The Brighton and Hove by-election was held last week in Rottingdean Coastal ward, and the Conservatives finished third in a close three-way contest; they lost that seat to Labour, who came through the middle to win on 30% of the vote. Given that the Conservatives started on 26% of the vote there as well, this does not give grounds for optimism. Brighton is not covered by East Sussex county council, but Peacehaven is: the Peacehaven county division was very safely Conservative in 2017 but was gained by Labour in 2021 by just 56 votes.

Defending Peacehaven West for the Conservatives is Katie Sanderson, who was the losing candidate here in the East Sussex county elections last year. Sanderson subsequently won this ward last July in a by-election to Peacehaven town council; within the local party, she is still young enough to chair the local branch of the Young Conservatives. The independent and UKIP candidates from 2019 have not returned. The Green candidate is Holly Atkins, who stood for Lewes council in 2019 in the Chailey, Barcombe and Hamsey ward at the far end of the district. Standing for the Lib Dems is Elizabeth Lee, a former mayor of the neighbouring town of Telscombe. However, on the evidence of the last county council election the main challenge for the Conservatives may well come from a party which didn’t contest this ward in 2019: the Labour candidate is Telscombe town councillor Ciarron Clarkson.

Parliamentary constituency: Brighton Kemptown
East Sussex county council division: Peacehaven
ONS Travel to Work Area: Brighton
Postcode district: BN10

Holly Atkins (Grn)
Ciarron Clarkson (Lab)
Elizabeth Lee (LD)
Katie Sanderson ©

May 2019 result C 329/323 Ind 270/152 UKIP 233 Grn 222/164 LD 209

Frensham, Dockenfield and Tilford

Waverley council, Surrey; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Brian Adams.

For our other by-election today we travel from the South to the North Downs, to a ward which covers four parishes between Farnham and Hindhead: the three in the title plus Churt. Although Churt is in the shadow of the North Downs, most of the ward is on more low-lying ground drained by the River Wey which flows through Frensham and Tilford.

Frensham itself is set in a large area of heathland, Frensham Common, which includes two large ponds. These are not natural features: Frensham Great Pond and Frensham Little Pond are mediaeval and were built to provide fish for the local landowners, the Bishops of Winchester. In 1128 one of those bishops founded England’s first Cistercian abbey, Waverley Abbey, which lay just outside the ward boundary on a branch of the Wey and gave its name to the current local government district. Both Frensham Common and Waverley Abbey are favoured locations for film crews, standing in for more exotic locations in a number of recent films and TV series.

The two branches of the Wey meet at Tilford, the home of the Rural Life Living Museum, where religion of a different sort is now prominent. The 2011 census recorded only 99 Muslims living in this ward, around 2.4% of the population, but one of them is Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the fifth and present Caliph of the Ahmadiyya branch of Islam. The Ahmadis, a movement founded in the Punjab in the nineteenth century, were effectively thrown out of Pakistan (which doesn’t recognise them as Muslims) in the 1980s and wound up in this corner of Surrey; Tilford is now home to the brand-new Mubarak Mosque and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s international headquarters.

Also in Tilford can be found one of the more picturesque of the UK’s polling stations. The Tilford Institute, next to the village green and cricket ground, was built in 1894 to a design by Edwin Lutyens.

As with Lewes council above, we have in Waverley a council where the Conservatives lost their majority in 2019 — in fact, the party crashed from 53 to 23 seats out of a possible 57 — and where a coalition of everybody else is running the show. To some extent the Conservatives did see this coming: Julia Potts, the leader of Waverley council going into that election, did the chicken run to here in 2019 from a more marginal ward.

The two main governing parties on the council are the Farnham Residents (who supply the council leader) and the Liberal Democrats. However, this ward is outside the Farnham Residents’ area, and the Lib Dems haven’t stood here since 2007; indeed the Conservative slate won this ward in 2011 and 2015 without a contest. Brian Adams, who passed away in February at the age of 78, had represented Frensham, Dockenfield and Tilford since 2011 but faced only one contested election, in 2019: on that occasion the Conservative slate won with 50% and the Green Party came in second on 33%. The ward is also safely Conservative at other levels of government: it is part of the Waverley Western Villages division of Surrey county council, and the former Conservative cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt is the MP for the local South West Surrey constituency.

Defending for the Conservatives is Nabeel Nasir, who lives in Farnham and stood there without success in the 2019 Waverley and 2021 Surrey county elections. The ruling coalition on Waverley council would appear to have thrown its weight behind the Green Party candidate Susan Ryland, an artist and university lecturer from Hindhead who was runner-up here in 2019 and is standing again; she was the Green parliamentary candidate for South West Surrey in 2015, finishing in sixth place but saving her deposit. The only other candidate in this by-election is notable enough for Wikipedia: David Munro, who lives in Frensham, had been a Conservative member of Waverley council and Surrey county council from the late 1990s until his election in 2016 as Surrey Police and Crime Commissioner. He was subsequently deselected by the Conservatives, and sought re-election as an independent PCC candidate in 2021, finishing fourth out of five candidates with a creditable 15%. Munro is again an independent candidate in this by-election.

Picture of the Tilford Institute by Nigel Cox, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Parliamentary constituency: South West Surrey
Surrey county council division: Waverley Western Villages
ONS Travel to Work Area: Guildford and Aldershot
Postcode districts: GU9, GU10

David Munro (Ind)
Nabeel Nasir ©
Susan Ryland (Grn)

May 2019 result C 683/590 Grn 454 Lab 228
May 2015 result 2 C unopposed
May 2011 result 2 C unopposed
May 2007 result C 1151/1122 LD 263
May 2003 result C 907/848 LD 348/321