Previewing the five council by-elections of 7th December 2023
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Five polls on 7th December 2023:
Rhyl South West
Denbighshire council, North Wales; caused by the death of Labour councillor Peter Prendergast.
We’ll start the week by considering one of the most deprived towns in the whole of Wales. Welcome to Rhyl, a seaside resort town on the north coast which was built to serve the demand for seaside holidays of the past. But as times changed and the better weather of the Mediterranean coasts became affordable for the masses, Rhyl was left behind. In the 21st century it’s a decaying seaside resort on flat land next to the mouth of the River Clwyd, a long way away from the more spectacular tourist draws of North Wales.
The census paints a picture of a very deprived and working-class town. Rhyl South West ward makes the top 20 wards in England and Wales for those working in semi-routine occupations (19.8%), the top 60 for employment in the health and social care sector (24.7%) and the top 75 for long-term sickness or disability (10.8%). It’s also one of Wales’ youngest wards, making the top 10 wards in Wales for both under-16s (26.4%) and 16- and 17-year-olds (3.7%). One wonders what jobs will be available for all those kids.
With all this deprivation comes a rather darker reputation for Rhyl. This column previously looked at Rhyl South West ward in March 2015. I noted then that
“The North Wales Daily Post reported this week that Rhyl station — on the division’s northern boundary — is one of the most violent in Britain, although this may be more of a statistical freak with only twelve such incidents reported there in 2013–14.”
Well, the bad news on crime seems to keep coming, and statistics for 2021 ranked Rhyl South West as having one of the top ten highest crime rates in Wales. The town has a particularly bad reputation for violence and sexual offences.
Rhyl is the largest town within the Vale of Clwyd parliamentary seat, which is closely fought between the Labour and the Conservatives: it has changed hands at all of the last three Westminster elections, and was the only Conservative gain in Wales at the 2021 Senedd election. The Boundary Commissioners’ axe has fallen particularly heavily on Wales, which is currently over-represented in the Commons; for the next Westminster general election the Vale of Clwyd seat will merge with the current Clwyd West to form a new seat taking in Rhyl, Denbigh and Colwyn Bay: this relatively urban seat will have the name “Clwyd North”. The current Vale of Clwyd Conservative MP James Davies will seek re-election in Clwyd East while the present Clwyd West MP — former Welsh secretary David Jones — is standing down, so Rhyl will get a new MP at some point in the next year.
Rhyl is the major source of Labour votes in both the current parliamentary seat and on Denbighshire council, where Labour are the largest party and govern in coalition with Plaid Cymru. I described Rhyl South West in 2015 as a safe Labour ward, and nothing has happened since to make me revise that assessment. The 2022 Denbighshire council elections here gave Labour a 59–27 lead over the Conservatives.
This by-election follows the death in September of Labour councillor Pete Prendergast, who was the winner of the 2015 by-election. He was chairman of Denbighshire council at the time of his death, having previously done that role in 2017–18, and also chaired the council’s leisure and fitness arm Denbighshire Leisure Ltd. Prendergast had also served on Rhyl town council for eleven years.
Defending this by-election for Labour is James May, who lives in the ward and is a Unison figure. The Conservatives have selected Leslie Peake, who contested Rhyl Trellewelyn ward in last year’s county elections. Also standing is the only independent candidate we will meet this week, ex-Conservative figure David Thomas.
Westminster and Senedd constituency: Vale of Clwyd
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Clwyd North
ONS Travel to Work Area: Rhyl
Postcode districts: LL18, LL19
James May (Lab)
Leslie Peake (C)
David Thomas (Ind)
May 2022 result Lab 529/492 C 246/241 Ind 122
Previous results in detail
Briston
North Norfolk council; caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Emma Coleman.
Now it’s off to East Anglia for the week’s most remote by-election. You might be forgiven for not having heard of Briston: this is a village of around 2,400 souls in deepest Norfolk, around twenty miles north-west of Norwich and well off the main roads and main transport links.
But this wasn’t always the case. Briston ward includes the eastern half of the village of Melton Constable, which is equally in the middle of nowhere now but used to be a major railway centre. Railway lines ran from here in four different directions: north to Cromer, west to King’s Lynn, east to North Walsham and south to Norwich, and the Midland and Great Northern Railway made Melton Constable the centre of its locomotive works. As a result Melton Constable grew in population from 118 to ten times that between 1881 and 1901, with some of that growth spilling over into Briston parish. The railway works closed in 1936 with the railway itself disappearing in 1964, and Melton Constable’s population has never recovered to its former level.
It wasn’t just the railway workers that gave this corner of rural Norfolk some competition for the local Conservatives. Back in the day the county’s major economic sector was agriculture, and Norfolk’s agriculture workers were unusual in that they were strongly unionised. Up until the 1960s the North Norfolk parliamentary seat regularly returned Labour MPs: Noel Buxton (who started off in the Liberals) was Ramsay Macdonald’s minister of agriculture when he represented North Norfolk in the 1920s, while the seat’s last Labour MP Bert Hazell was president of the National Union of Agricultural Workers for ten years. The county council division covering Melton Constable — which includes Briston ward — had a Labour county councillor all the way up to 2001.
But by then the main challenge to the North Norfolk Conservatives had passed to the Liberal Democrats. The North Norfolk parliamentary seat was represented by the Lib Dems’ Sir Norman Lamb from 2001 to 2019; when he retired in December 2019 this seat turned in the Lib Dems’ worst result of that election, with the Conservatives’ Duncan Baker gaining North Norfolk on a swing of 17%.
This came after the North Norfolk Conservatives had crashed and burned in the May 2019 local elections. North Norfolk council, which covers a rather larger area than the parliamentary seat, has been quite swingy in recent years, and the Tories did pick themselves up off the floor a bit and gain seats in the May 2023 elections — rather against the national trend. However, the council remains under Liberal Democrat control. Briston ward turned in a reduced Lib Dem majority over the Tories of 52–41; the Local Elections Archive Project counts this as a hold, but in fact the Liberal Democrats recovered a seat which they had lost when their previous councillor Jolanda Stenton crossed the floor to the Conservatives.
The new Lib Dem councillor Emma Coleman served for less than six months before standing down on health grounds at the end of October. To succeed her the Liberal Democrats have selected Andrew Fletcher, a teacher who contested Bacton ward in May. The Conservatives have reselected Jolanda Stenton, who lost her seat in May and wants it back. Also standing are Phil Harris for Labour and James Whitehead for the Green Party.
Parliamentary constituency: North Norfolk
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): North Norfolk
Norfolk county council division: Melton Constable
ONS Travel to Work Area: Cromer and Sheringham
Postcode district: NR24
Andrew Fletcher (LD)
Phil Harris (Lab)
Jolanda Stenton (C)
James Whitehead (Grn)
May 2023 result LD 366 C 288 Lab 56
May 2019 result LD 408 C 271 Lab 30
Previous results in detail
Harpenden Rural
Hertfordshire county council; and
Sandridge and Wheathampstead
St Albans council, Hertfordshire; caused respectively by the resignations of Conservative councillor Annie Brewster and Liberal Democrat councillor Kristian Gavan.
We now come to a fascinating contest in a recent Conservative disaster area. Let’s travel to Hertfordshire, where we are in the countryside around Harpenden for two by-elections defended by different parties.
The largest population centre within the Harpenden Rural county division is the village of Wheathampstead, which lies a few miles east of Harpenden in the valley of the River Lea, as it takes its winding course between Luton and London. There are ancient earthworks here, the so-called Devil’s Dyke, associated with an Iron Age settlement which has been claimed to be the ancient capital of the Catuvellauni tribe. If so, then Julius Caesar, in his second British invasion of 54 BC, may have besieged Wheathampstead.
The Catuvellauni subsequently moved their capital a few miles south-west to Verlamion, another Iron Age settlement. This turned into the Roman city of Verulamium, a stopping point on Watling Street which begat the modern city of St Albans. The modern city is a mile to the east of the old Roman site, much of which is now a park next to the Verulamium Museum. This museum is a polling station for the county by-election today; the museum itself is outside the division boundary, but within the lines we find the Roman Theatre. This was built in or around AD 140, and is claimed to be the the UK’s oldest producing theatre: dramas, comedies and tragedies are still performed there today each summer.
Further up Watling Street and close to its modern successor, the M1 motorway, we find the village of Redbourn: this was the site of the martyrdom of St Amphibalus, who converted the ill-fated St Alban to Christianity. Much of the space between Redbourn and Harpenden is given over to agricultural research: Rothamsted Research has been here since the 1840s, helping to feed the world by developing better agricultural methods, better plants, better herbicides and pesticides, and indeed better statistical methods to try and make sense of the results of their experiments. Rothamsted Research supports around 350 scientists, with most of its funding coming from Defra and other government bodies.
The last piece of the puzzle is the village of Sandridge, on the main road between Wheathampstead and St Albans. The development of St Albans means that Sandridge is now linked to the city’s built-up area, but it’s still recognisable as a separate village.
This whole area is currently within the Hitchin and Harpenden parliamentary seat, which is represented by Conservative Treasury minister Bim Afolami. But not for much longer: his seat will be divided into two new constituencies at the next election, with Harpenden Rural transferring to the completely new seat of Harpenden and Berkhamsted. This is notionally a safe Conservative seat, and the Harpenden Rural county division has results to match: at the last Hertfordshire county council elections in 2021 Conservative county councillor Annie Brewster was re-elected with a 57–25 lead over the Lib Dems.
District council elections here are another matter. The local authority here is St Albans council, which has been subject to a major Lib Dem takeover in recent years; from a Conservative majority in 2015–19, the Liberal Democrats now hold 47 out of 56 seats plus the vacancy in Sandridge and Wheathampstead ward. With its educated commuter demographic this area is traditionally a Tory banker, but at the first election on the current ward boundaries in May 2022 the Lib Dems narrowly won all three seats: vote shares were 41% for the Lib Dems, 38% for the Conservatives and 13% for the Green Party. In May this year the Lib Dems increased their majority to 49–39. The Harpenden Rural county division as a whole clearly voted Liberal Democrat in May: the Lib Dems carried all the constituent wards except Harpenden South, only a small corner of which is part of the division.
So there’s a couple of tasty by-elections coming up. The county by-election is to replace Annie Brewster, who has stepped down after a political career which has seen her serve at county, district and parish level. Brewster was Mayor of St Albans in 2013–14, she was chairman of Hertfordshire county council in 2022–23, and in 2024–25 she will become High Sheriff of Hertfordshire — with which comes the title of returning officer for Hertfordshire’s county constituencies. Before entering politics she had a distinguished career in athletics, which included a silver medal in the 1,500 metres at the UK Championships when she was 17. Once Annie Brewster had announced her retirement, Lib Dem district councillor and City financier Kristian Gavan took the opportunity to leave the stage so that the two by-elections could be held together.
Let’s take the candidate list for the district by-election first. Defending Sandridge and Wheathampstead for the Lib Dems is Simon Johns, on whom I have no information. The Conservatives have selected Claudio Duran, a native Chilean who co-founded and runs a nursing care company; he has previously served on Sandridge parish council. Also standing are Oliver Hitch for the Green Party and James Morrell for Labour. The outgoing councillor Kristian Gavan was elected in second place at the 2022 all-out elections giving him a term ending in May 2024, so whoever wins this poll will not be able to rest for long before needing to seek re-election.
Claudio Duran is doubling up at both district and county level for the Conservatives, so he is the defending candidate in the Harpenden Rural by-election. Standing for the Lib Dems here is Allison Wren, who has represented Harpenden North and Rural ward on St Albans council since 2021 and now has the chance to double up at county level; Wren has spent much of the last few decades in the USA, working in the biomedical sector. Also standing here are Symon Vegro for Labour and Mario May for the Green Party.
Harpenden Rural
Parliamentary constituency: Hitchin and Harpenden
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Harpenden and Berkhamsted
St Albans council wards: Redbourn, Sandridge and Wheathampstead, Harpenden North and Rural (part: Harpenden Rural parish), Harpenden South (part: part within Wheathampstead ward before 2021), Marshalswick West (part within Sandridge ward before 2021), Verulam (part: part of St Michael parish)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Luton
Postcode districts: AL2, AL3, AL4, AL5, AL6, HP2, HP3, LU2
Claudio Duran (C)
Mario May (Grn)
Symon Vegro (Lab)
Allison Wren (LD)
May 2021 result C 2833 LD 1253 Lab 531 Grn 341
May 2017 result C 2795 LD 868 Lab 479 Grn 190 UKIP 148
Previous results in detail
Sandridge and Wheathampstead
Parliamentary constituency: Hitchin and Harpenden
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Harpenden and Berkhamsted
Hertfordshire county council division: Harpenden Rural
ONS Travel to Work Area: Luton
Postcode districts: AL3, AL4, AL5, AL6, LU2
Claudio Duran (C)
Oliver Hitch (Grn)
Simon Johns (LD)
James Morrell (Lab)
May 2023 result LD 1213 C 960 Grn 166 Lab 148
May 2022 result LD 1358/1298/1254 C 1240/1125/984 Grn 432 Lab 274
Previous results in detail
Hayes and Coney Hall
Bromley council, London; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Andrew Lee.
We finish up for the week in a part of Greater London whose census return is rather unusual. Hayes and Coney Hall ward ranks second of all the wards in London for owner-occupation (87.3% of households), and its population is unusually white, British and old with high levels of car ownership. Something you might associate more with the countryside around London.
Well, Hayes used to be part of that countryside — until the railways came here in 1882 and turned Hayes into an outer commuter centre on the edge of London’s built-up area. Hayes railway station is the terminus of the Mid-Kent railway line from Charing Cross — a name which is now rather misleading, because none of the Mid-Kent line has been within the Kent county council area since the establishment of Greater London in the 1960s.
To the south Hayes runs seamlessly into Coney Hall, beyond which the houses stop and the North Downs begin. A trip through woodland brings us to the rather exclusive village of Keston, which gave its name to and was the original home of the Keston Institute which studies religion and religious freedom in Communist and former Communist countries. (After a spell in Oxford, the Keston Institute is now based in Texas.)
You can’t accuse Keston’s politics of being Communist, though. The local authority here is the London Borough of Bromley, which has been in Conservative hands since its creation in 1965 with the exception of a period of no overall control from 1998 to 2001. Hayes and Coney Hall is very much part of the Conservative majority: in May 2022 it gave 43% to the Conservative slate, 26% to Labour and 17% to the Green Party.
The ward is presently part of the Beckenham parliamentary seat, which has only ever returned Conservatives since its creation in 1950 — although the current incumbent, Bob Stewart, has recently given up the Conservative whip after being convicted of a racially-aggravated public order offence last month. He was fined £600, a sentence which is a long way below the threshold for a recall petition or councillor disqualification. Boundary changes for the next general election will move Hayes and Coney Hall into a new parliamentary seat called Bromley and Biggin Hill: this is the successor to the current seat of Bromley and Chislehurst, represented since a 2006 by-election by the chair of the Commons Justice committee Sir Bob Neill.
Sir Bob cut his political teeth in local government: he served on Havering council in the 1980s, was the last GLC councillor for Romford (1985–86) and was the first London Assembly member for Bexley and Bromley (2000–08). The latter is the safest Conservative seat in the London Assembly, and three of its previous incumbents have gone on to become MPs — including the current Home Secretary, James Cleverly.
Cleverly and Neill will both have worked closely with the late Conservative councillor Andrew Lee, who became the Bromley Conservatives’ election agent in 2004 and held that role for fourteen years. He had worked in the retail and advertising sector before entering the political backrooms, and recently worked as a self-employed political consultant before finally making it to elected office in 2022 as a Bromley councillor. Unfortunately, Lee didn’t get the long council career his efforts deserved: he died suddenly in October, aged just 66.
Defending for the Conservatives is Josh Coldspring-White, who is a media monitoring officer at CCHQ. Perhaps this column is on his list of media to monitor? Who knows. Coldspring-White contested Penge and Cator ward in last year’s Bromley elections; all the other candidates for this by-election fought this ward in 2022, without success. The Labour candidate is Susan Moore, who was a rather distant runner-up to the late Andrew Lee last year; Moore works in education for another London borough, and is on the steering committee of Environmental Action Coney Hall. The latter organisation was founded by Sarah Chant, a retired secondary school teacher who returns as the Green candidate for this by-election. The Lib Dems’ Tudor Griffiths completes the ballot paper.
Parliamentary constituency: Beckenham
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Bromley and Biggin Hill
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: BR2, BR4
Sarah Chant (Grn)
Josh Coldspring-White (C)
Tudor Griffiths (LD)
Susan Moore (Lab)
May 2022 result C 2527/2347/2184 Lab 1552/1171/1049 Grn 986 LD 868/679/491
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). The 2022 edition is out now, and might make an excellent Christmas present for the political enthusiast in your family! You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale
