North East voters have chosen Kim McGuinness and Ben Houchen as their regional mayors for the next four years.
We must wish McGuinness success in her task of managing the early stages of a 30-year devolution deal that will ultimately be worth over £1.4bn as well as the other funding that will come her way.
She must live up to the expectations of almost 2mn people between Berwick and Barnard Castle frustrated for decades by the failed plans of successive governments to ‘level up’ the North East to the economic standard of the rest of the country.
The task will be made easier, but the expectations correspondingly higher, if the new mayor has a friendly Labour government to work with after the forthcoming general election.
In the case of Lord Houchen, he does not start his third term with a clean slate. We must hope he will be more successful than so far in managing public funds to the standard expected, which he failed to do in the case of the Teesworks regeneration site, according to an independent review for the government. He should start by renegotiating, if he can, the joint venture he signed with two local businessmen giving them a 90% stake in Teesworks, as well as implementing the other 27 recommendations in the independent review.
The victories for McGuinness and Houchen will come as a relief to their party leaders, Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak respectively. McGuinness was selected as Labour’s mayoral candidate after North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll was barred from the party’s shortlist; he subsequently resigned and ran against his former colleague as an Independent. But McGuiness beat him comfortably. Houchen’s victory in Tees Valley was a rare ray of hope for Sunak in a dismal election for the Tories.
Lessons from the elections
The mayoral elections were far from being the only ballots in the North East last week. There were also votes for one-third of councillors on four of the five Tyne & Wear councils (Newcastle, Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland) and all-out elections for the fifth (North Tyneside) as well as for a third of Hartlepool councillors and three police and crime commissioners (PCCs) for Northumbria, Durham and Cleveland. Together these ballots give us a fair picture of the current state of the region’s political balance.
Figure 1
Figure 1 tells us six significant facts about regional state of the main political parties and groups, including unaffiliated Independents and others:
- In Tyne & Wear, as North East Bylines demonstrated recently, Labour’s vote share during the most turbulent years following the Brexit referendum and during Jeremy Corbyn’s time as party leader fell by almost 10% from 51% to 41.6%. We already know that it clawed back much of that loss to reach 48.4% in 2022, but we can now see that it has declined again slowly to 44.9% this year. That is still enough to enable it to hold the five councils comfortably, but Labour strategists must worry if it becomes a trend.
- Labour’s worry is not the Conservatives, whose vote share peaked at 26.4% in 2021 but has been in steady decline and is now only 13%.
- Nor is it the LibDems, who have been flatlining since 2019 and now stand only just behind the Conservatives on 12.9%. If the Tories continue on their current downward path the LibDems will become Tyne & Wear’s second party by vote share by default.
- Nor is it UKIP and its successor party, Reform UK. Turning its hype into real success at the polls is proving difficult. In spite of a few scattered successes, its vote share across the five Tyne & Wear councils was only 4.1% and even that low figure was better than last year; its peak was in 2015, before the Brexit referendum, at 14.9%.
- No. The biggest potential threat to Labour and other parties is perhaps the Green Party, just starting in recent years to loom over the horizon of local politics. As Figure 1 shows, apart from one small blip its vote share has been rising incrementally. In 2015 it was just 5.4%. This year it was almost three times that, on 15.1%. And it is starting to turn votes into seats. It now has 11 councillors in South Tyneside after two gains last week and is a force to be reckoned with; it also won its first two seats in Newcastle; and with 18.7% of vote share in North Tyneside almost overtook the Tories for second place.
- Independents have also been gaining vote share steadily in Tyne & Wear and this year reached 9.9%. Though they do not threaten Labour control, they weaken support for potentially all the main parties and are a sign of public frustration with mainstream politics.
Newcastle
In spite of celebrating the election of their first councillor in Newcastle since the 1990s, the Conservatives put up a dismal performance over the city as a whole. Their victory in Gosforth was a gain not from Labour but the Liberal Democrats, achieved narrowly by a popular local figure.
But the Tory vote share across the city was a meagre 9.9% after falling steadily from 17.6% in 2021. Labour over the same period has seen its share rise, if somewhat erratically, from 39.2% to 47.8%.
The Greens had the greatest cause for celebration, making their first breakthrough in Newcastle, winning two seats from Labour in Elswick and council leader Nick Kemp’s Byker.
North Tyneside
North Tyneside, where alone among councils in the region an all-out election rather than a one-in-three ballot was held, emerged with Labour holding 51 seats out of 60, as it has every year since 2021. The only change in the make-up of the council was that the Tories gained two seats to eight and Others fell from three to one.
In terms of vote share, Labour suffered a quite sharp drop this year from 55.5% in 2023, when it was the party’s best performer in Tyne & Wear, to closer to average with 46%. The Conservatives lost vote share too, down from 26.9% to 19.2%.
The big winners, as in Newcastle, were the Greens. Though they did not win a seat they almost doubled their vote share from 9.8% to 18.7% and only narrowly fell short of replacing the Tories, who polled 19.2%, as the second largest party by that measure.
Gateshead
Gateshead saw no significant change this year. Labour lost one seat and now has 48 councillors out of 66 while the Liberal Democrats gained one and have 18. Labour’s vote share is just under 50% compared with just over 50% a year ago. The LibDem share has dropped over the same period from 27.5% to 25.5%.
The Conservatives however, who reached a recent peak of 22.5% in 2021, have since fallen back and now seem to have settled at a low point of 12-13%.
South Tyneside
South Tyneside is an exception. This year’s results were a disaster for the main parties in terms of both seats and vote share. The Conservatives lost their only seat on the council and took a mere 4.7% of votes across the borough; only three years ago they took 21.5%. But it was just as bad for Labour, which lost ten seats this year and now holds just 28 on the 54-seat authority and faces a struggle to retain its overall majority. Its vote share fell to just 36%; only two years ago it was 48.6%.
The two big winners in South Tyneside were the Greens and Independents. Independents took 28.1% of vote share and gained nine seats, making them the second largest group on the council with 15. The Greens took a slightly greater share of votes with 29.3% though they gained only two seats, giving them a total of 11. South Tyneside politics is at an unusually high level of flux.
Sunderland
Labour has steadied the ship in Sunderland after losses in 2019-2022. It gained six seats to give it 53 on the 75-seat council, while the Conservatives lost three, Independents two and Reform UK one. The LibDems remain unchanged.
In terms of votes, Labour’s share has stabilised in the mid-40% range, where it has now rested for three years after dipping to 39.3% in 2021. The Tories, on the other hand hit a record low for recent times, falling to 18.1% this year; in 2021 they hit 34.8%. The LibDems remain steady in the mid-teens where they have been since 2021. Reform UK jumped this year to 14.5% from 6.7% but still failed to win a seat.
Hartlepool
Elsewhere in the region, in Hartlepool, the only one of Tess Valley’s five councils to go to the polls this year, Labour regained control of the council, as reported by North East Bylines’ Julia Mazza, and continued its steady progress in terms of vote share. It now has 24 of the 36 councillors, an increase of seven. The Conservatives lost six seats, leaving them with six, the same as Independents.
In terms of vote share, Labour won 46.5%, well up on its 30.7% in 2021 on the same day it lost a parliamentary by-election to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. It continues to build on its 42.3% in 2022 and 44.6% last year. This puts Hartlepool Labour on a par with its party colleagues in Tyne & Wear.
The Tories took a 24.7% share this time, about the same as last year and in the council elections in 2021, but well below their peak of 34.2% in 2022. Reform UK almost doubled its vote share to 14.3% this time but did not win a seat. Assorted Independents won 22.9% and two seats but still have one fewer on the new council than the old.
Mayors
The race for North East Mayor, won comfortably by McGuinness for Labour, confirms the party’s support as being in the 40%-plus range, even including Northumberland where there are three Tory parliamentary constituencies out of four and Durham where there are three Tory MPs out of six. McGuinness won 41.3% and Jamie Driscoll, standing as an Independent, came second with 28.2%.
Labour also won 41.3% for the Tees Valley mayoralty but it was not enough to defeat the populist and controversial incumbent, Lord Houchen. Houchen’s vote share was cut drastically however from the 72.8% of his landslide victory in 2021 to 53.6%. The Liberal Democrats took 5%.
Police and Crime Commissioners
Labour won the PCC position in Northumbria with 51%, which as with the Tyne & Wear councils, represents a recovery of about half the votes lost in earlier years. The party won with 56% of first preferences in 2012 and 55% in 2016 before falling to 46% in 2021. It is a similar story in Durham, where Labour’s share of the PCC vote peaked at 64% in 2016 before falling to 44% in 2021 and now bouncing more than half way to 56%. In Cleveland, Labour regained the PCC post this week with 53%, its best-ever performance, in a straight fight with the Conservatives.
Conclusion
In spite of the unpopularity of the Tory government’s austerity policy Labour has come through almost a decade that has been very difficult for it, due to the populism of Boris Johnson, the popularity of Brexit among some Labour supporters and the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader. The result was that by the start of the 2020s its vote share was down in the region by about 10%, even threatening its control of some authorities, notably Sunderland, and enabling the populist Houchen to win and twice retain the Tees Valley mayoralty.
Labour has now recovered more than half its losses and is again in a strong position in the North East, though less so in Tees Valley, and it also now faces a challenge to hang on and rebuild in South Tyneside.
With the exception of some shock parliamentary victories in “red wall” seats in 2019 and Houchen’s populist success in Tees Valley, the Tories have been unable to break Labour’s grip on power in the region. The LibDems have significant numbers of seats in Newcastle and Gateshead (as well as places with no elections this year and therefore not discussed here, such as Durham) but generally remain stuck on a percentage vote share in the mid-teens. Reform UK makes sporadic progress but rarely if ever by enough to win a seat. The Greens however are starting to pick up seats in a few places such as South Tyneside and Newcastle. North Tyneside could be next.
Sources: council websites, ChronicleLive, TeessideLive, BBC, Wikipedia. Calculations: author.
