Phil Rodgers: County council likely to remain in no overall control after poll on 1 May
Our political correspondent, Phil Rodgers, looks at the seats up for grabs in the Cambridge and elsewhere in the county council elections on 1 May.
I am probably going to jinx it, but this year has seen some of the best weather during a Cambridge local election campaign that I can remember. Day after day the sun has smiled on party activists as they tramped the streets knocking on doors. The only slight downside of all the good weather from the election campaigner’s point of view is that it makes it much more likely that the voters will be down the end of the garden or out at the local park instead of lurking behind the front door ready to debate the finer points of local government reorganisation. Even so, I’m sure the activists have been enjoying this year’s weather a lot more than last year’s rather soggier conditions.
It’s not very long until we find out who the voters will be smiling on when polling day arrives on 1 May. Indeed some votes have already been cast by now, as the first batch of postal vote packs went out last week.
In my last column I took a look at the mayoral contest, and concluded that the Conservative candidate Paul Bristow was probably the front runner, though certainly not guaranteed to win. Now that we know the full line-up of candidates, I still think that’s the case. Along with Anna Smith for Labour and Lorna Dupré for the Lib Dems, Mr Bristow’s challengers now include Bob Ensch for the Greens and Ryan Coogan for Reform UK.
I understand there was some internal debate in the Green Party about whether to run a candidate, since they would probably reduce Labour’s vote and make a Conservative victory easier. However the presence of a Reform UK candidate is likely to have the opposite effect, hurting the Conservatives more than Labour – indeed with Reform leading some opinion polls nationally, this effect could be quite substantial. Reform are now getting their campaign into gear in some parts of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, but I still think their relative lack of an experienced ground operation will tell against them. They will undoubtedly inject a good-sized dollop of uncertainty into the mayoral election result, though.
I also have one correction to my last column. I wrongly said that there had never been an Independent candidate for mayor of the combined authority. In fact there has – Peter Dawe stood as an Independent in 2017, winning 4.6 per cent of the vote. Apologies to Mr Dawe for the error.
What can we expect in the county council election? In Cambridge at least, I think we’ll see a swing from Labour to the Lib Dems, but perhaps more because of the government’s drooping approval ratings than anything else. I’m also expecting some gains for the Greens, who are running a highly targeted campaign. Like most Cambridge elections, I think it’ll be pretty tough for the Conservatives, and despite Reform UK contesting every seat in Cambridge for the first time, I don’t expect them to make much impact in the city either.
To give you an idea of the battleground in Cambridge, the graph shows the results in each seat in the city at the last county council elections in 2021. It’s worth noting that the boundaries are different from those for city council elections – Cambridge has 14 city council wards, but only 12 county council divisions. There is just a single Chesterton seat at county level, and poor old Coleridge is dismembered and split up amongst its neighbours. I’ve listed the seats in descending order of Labour’s majority last time – though as we’ll see, this doesn’t always correspond directly to the likely outcome this time.
It’s not very long ago that Labour were virtually assured of victory in half the seats in Cambridge before the local election campaign had even started. Not any more. There are now only three county council seats that they can be confident about – Arbury, Cherry Hinton, and Petersfield – and even in those I’m expecting to see some reduced majorities. In all the other seats they are defending, Labour are likely to face considerably more of a challenge than they did last time.
In Cambridge at least, Labour’s main opponents are the Lib Dems, and there are likely to be some close contests in a number of traditional Lib-Lab battlegrounds. The Lib Dems will be hoping to recapture Market, which Labour won from them last time, and also to make some progress in Castle. Chesterton is another Lib Dem target, as are the by-elections in the East and West Chesterton city council wards. Meanwhile the Lib Dems should be reasonably confident of holding on to their two safest seats in Cambridge, Queen Edith’s and Trumpington.
In recent years the Greens have been steadily increasing their representation on the city council, with the help of careful and effective targeting of their campaign resources. This time they are hoping to win their first county council seats since 2009. It’s widely expected that they will gain both Abbey and Newnham – though Green activists don’t like it very much when you say this, because the last thing they want is for their supporters to think it’s already in the bag and there’s no point turning out. However, the decision of Lib Dem council leader Lucy Nethsingha not to defend her Newnham seat, but to switch to Cambourne instead, tells its own story.
A ‘stretch goal’ for the Greens is Romsey, where they have also been putting in significant effort. As you can see from the graph, this would be a sensational victory if they could manage it, but despite Labour’s towering majority, it certainly isn’t impossible. Many traditional Labour voters in Romsey are unhappy with the new government, and another factor is that the Romsey county council seat includes a good-sized chunk of the Coleridge city council seat, where the Greens finished in a strong second place last year.
The most active Conservative campaign in the city this year is in King’s Hedges, where Delowar Hossain is hoping to add the county council seat to his existing city council one by defeating Labour’s group leader Elisa Meschini. However, this is a pretty tall order given the national picture – while Labour are clearly less popular now than they were in 2021, Conservative poll ratings have slumped to around half what they were, leaving even the most effective Conservative campaigner running up the down escalator.
Reform UK are standing in every seat for the first time in a Cambridge local election, though some of their candidates are based in fairly distant parts of the county. I think it’s fair to say that Cambridge is not natural Reform UK territory, and even if Reform do end up sweeping to victory everywhere else, it wouldn’t be very surprising if the city ended up like Asterix’s village surrounded by the Roman empire.
What about the battle for county council seats outside Cambridge? As in the city, the Conservatives, Greens, Labour, Lib Dems, and Reform UK are contesting every available seat, and there are a number of seats where Independent candidates are strongly placed. South Cambs and East Cambs are primarily Conservative-Lib Dem battlegrounds. The Lib Dems may lose some ground due to the increased number of Labour and Green candidates, but this will certainly be counterbalanced by the effect that Reform will have on the Conservative vote. Both Fenland and Huntingdonshire were dominated by the Conservatives last time, but it’s here that the Reform UK challenge will be strongest, and other parties and Independents will also hope to pick up some gains from the blue team.
Could the Lib Dems take outright control of the county council? They would need to make a net gain of eleven seats compared to their showing in 2021, which would require some pretty spectacular gains, and would be very much at the upper end of their range of expectations. I think it’s more likely that the county council will remain in no overall control, and we’ll see a continuation of the Lib Dem/Labour/Independent coalition which has been in charge for the last four years.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that this is likely to be the very last set of elections to Cambridgeshire County Council. If government reforms proceed as planned, the local political landscape will be changed forever in around three years time, as the county and district councils are swept away and replaced by some as yet unknown number of new unitary councils. But whatever happens, come rain or shine, party campaigners will still be out on the streets of Cambridge asking for your support.
