Elections take place today for all five councils in Tyne & Wear plus Hartlepool in Tees Valley. There will also be voting for metro mayors for the North East and Tees Valley and for three police and crime commissioners (PCCs)for Northumbria, Durham and Cleveland.
The elections are part of wider polling for 107 councils in England and Wales, the London mayor and assembly, ten mayors outside London and 37 PCCs which together are being seen as a challenge to Rishi Sunak’s position as prime minister and a test of Labour’s prospects in the forthcoming general election.
So what should people in the North East look out for when the regional votes come in on Thursday night and Friday morning as a guide to what is likely to happen when the general election comes round later this year or by next January at the latest?
Seats
Labour is virtually certain to hold all five councils in Tyne & Wear – North Tyneside, Newcastle, Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland – with large or at least comfortable majorities. If it does so that will not tell us much.
The party has controlled most of the councils for most of the time since they were set up in 1974. Labour’s grip on power has been broken only in Newcastle by the Liberal Democrats between 2004 and 2011 and in North Tyneside where there was a Conservative directly-elected borough mayor in 2003-05 and again in 2009-2013.
The four-year election cycle on the five councils, with one-third of councillors facing re-election annually plus a gap in the fourth year with no voting, makes it difficult at any time for any opposition party anywhere to wrest control from opponents holding a comfortable majority. Sustained increases in vote share over a number of years are needed.
Even that is not always enough if a ruling party enjoys a large majority, as Labour did in Tyne & Wear, for example in 2015, which was arguably the last year of “normal” politics in the UK before the political tumult of the Brexit referendum in 2016 and its turbulent aftermath.
Following the council elections in 2015 Labour was in an extremely strong position on all five authorities, holding 49 seats out of 60 in North Tyneside, 53 out of 78 in Newcastle, 55 of 66 in Gateshead and 66 of 75 in Sunderland. Figures for South Tyneside are not available, but Labour certainly held a large majority.
The party’s grip weakened over the following four years as Theresa May struggled to implement the referendum vote to leave the European Union (EU) and was ousted by Boris Johnson and as Jeremy Corbyn proved a controversial Labour leader. The council elections in May 2019 came just seven months before Johnson won an 80-seat majority in a general election campaign in which he promised to “get Brexit done.”
Even these factors, however, were not enough to break Labour’s hold on power on the Tyne & Wear councils. It actually held more seats in 2019 than in 2015 in North Tyneside with 52 and Newcastle with 54 and slipped only slightly in Gateshead to 52. It was also very strong in South Tyneside, with 48 seats out of 54.
But Labour lost a significant number of seats in Sunderland, the city that had shocked the nation on referendum night by declaring a majority to leave the EU. Labour’s share of seats there dropped from 66 in 2015 to 51 in 2019. The lost seats were distributed among its opponents, with the Conservatives doubling their strength from six to 12, the LibDems rising from zero in 2015 to eight and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) picking up three.
Votes
But the parties’ vote shares tell a slightly different story. Over Tyne & Wear as a whole Labour’s share of the votes fell between 2015 and 2019 by almost 10% from 51% to 41.6%. The beneficiaries of this seepage of Labour support were not the Tories, who lost votes too – down from 18.4% to 16.1% – or UKIP and its successor party Reform UK (down from 14.9% to 12.1%) but the LibDems, who almost doubled their share from 7.8% to 14%, the Greens (up from 5.4% to 9.9%) and assorted Independents (up from 2.5% to 6.4%).
These increasing numbers for LibDems, Green and others, totalling 30.3% by 2019, are perhaps indicative of growing disenchantment among voters for the two main parties.
Be that as it may, following a year without council elections because of Covid, Labour started in 2021 to rebuild its vote share with some, but not total, success. As Figure 1 shows, it raised its share across Tyne & Wear as a whole from its nadir of 41.6% in 2019 to 43.4% in 2021 and 48.4% in 2022 before stabilising at 47.4% in 2023.
The Conservatives peaked at 26.4% in 2021 before falling back again. The LibDems, after a blip in 2021, falling back slightly to 12.3%, have since risen incrementally to 14.9% and the Greens have performed similarly to reach 10.7%. Assorted Independents, including the Official Monster Raving Looney Party – by now a British tradition – and the entertainingly named Space Navy Party, as well as serious Independents in places like Newcastle’s Outer West, have also gained aggregate vote share to reach 8.3%.
But UKIP/Reform UK, having reached 14.9% in 2015 and 12.1% four years later, was down to 1.8% last year.
These figures are averages, with somewhat different pictures in different individual councils. Vote share for Labour in 2019 was still as high as 49.1% in North Tyneside but bottomed out at just 32.7% in Sunderland, a dangerously low proportion for the party and mirroring its loss of seats in the city on the Wear as noted above. It has since recovered to 45.5% in 2023.
Figure 1
Tyne & Wear – the big questions
In light of the above, the first big question in Tyne & Wear is not whether Labour will retain control of the five councils, which it almost certainly will, or even the number of seats it wins, but the size of its vote share. Can it resume its ascent to the average 51% in held in 2015, before Brexit disrupted British politics, or will it fall back again to the just over 41% to which it dropped in 2019; or will it settle two or three points below 50%, where it has been for the past two years? This is what will matter to Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and their parties.
There are other important local issues for some of the individual councils. In Sunderland, can Labour halt the advance of the Conservatives and LibDems, who between them currently hold 32 seats to Labour’s 41. And in South Tyneside can the Greens continue to build on their growing strength, up from three seats in 2021 to six in 2022 and nine last year?
Hartlepool
The Conservatives won a parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool on 6 May 2021 with 51.9% of the votes to Labour’s 28.7%, but in council elections the same day the tables were turned and the Tories took only 25.7% compared with Labour’s 30.7%.
Labour’s performance in the council elections in 2023 with 44.6% was its best in the town for at least three years, following 30.7% in 2021 and 42.3% in 2022. This year the party will be hoping to build on that, bringing its vote share closer to 50% or even more like its Tyne & Wear neighbours.
Two other factors are notable about Hartlepool’s recent voting record. UKIP/Reform put up a relatively strong performance in the town in 2023, but still received only 7.5% – nowhere near enough to give it a realistic hope of winning the seat at the forthcoming general election.
However, Hartlepool does, or at least did, have a large number of apparently disaffected but fragmented voters. In 2021 as many as 40.8% voted for an assortment of Independents and others, though this proportion has since roughly halved.
Police and Crime Commissioners
The three PCC elections in Northumbria, Durham and Cleveland offer a further opportunity to judge the relative strength of the parties. Northumbria and Durham are both currently held by Labour and likely to remain so. But again, the size of the vote share will tell us something about the relative strengths of the main parties.
In Northumbria (Figure 2), Labour’s voting share follows a similar pattern to that of the five Tyne & Wear councils, though the time scale is different, with elections in 2012, 2016 and 2021. Labour won 56% of first preference votes in 2012 and 55% in 2016, but dropped by 9% to 46% in 2021 before winning on second preferences. The Tories have been the main beneficiaries, up from a low point of 18% in 2016 to 31% in 2021.
The single transferable vote system for PCC elections has now been abolished in favour of the UK’s traditional first-past-the-post system, so whoever is to win this time will simply need more votes than any of the other three candidates. But Labour will be hoping for a least 50% to put it on a par with the share the party won in the Tyne & Wear council elections of 2015 before politics was disrupted by the referendum.
Figure 2
In Durham (Figure 3) Labour peaked at 64% of first preference votes in 2016 before falling to just 44% in 2021, just pipping Boris Johnson’s Tories on 43%. In 2012, when Labour won 52% of first preferences there had been a significant intervention by a strong Independent, who won 26.8% of first preference votes, and to a lesser extent by UKIP, which won 11.8%.
Figure 3
So, similarly to the five Tyne & Wear councils, Labour will be hoping to get back above 50% of votes as achieved in both Northumbria and Durham in 2012 and 2016 first preferences compared with its first preference achievement of the mid-40s in 2021.
In Cleveland, Labour will be hoping to win back the PCC position it held between 2012 and 2020. The party won 60.8% of the votes to the Conservatives’ 39.2% in 2012 and 62.1% to the Tories 37.9% in 2016, in both cases after taking account of second preferences. But in 2021 the Conservatives won with 54.5% of first preference votes to Labour’s 28.9%.
In a straight fight with the Conservatives on Thursday Labour will be hoping to win with over 60%. Though the Cleveland PCC does not cover exactly the same geography as the Tees Valley Mayor, omiting Darlington, the result could give a clearer indication of the state of political opinion than the mayoral election as it will not be directly affected one way or another by the Ben Houchen factor.
Mayors
Mayoral elections also being held in the region on Thursday promise to be fascinating but not to provide much guidance, if any, to the outcome of the general election because of the special local circumstances attaching to each.
The election of a mayor covering the seven councils in Tyne & Wear, Northumberland and Durham will be the first covering this geography and the first since the whole area negotiated a 30-year devolution deal with the government. So there is nothing to compare it with directly. In addition, the current North of Tyne Mayor, Jamie Driscoll, who was elected in 2019 as the Labour candidate, was excluded from the party’s shortlist for North East Mayor, resigned and is standing for the new post as an Independent. Who knows what will happen?
In Tees Valley the serving Conservative mayor, Lord Ben Houchen, is standing for a third term. He won his first in 2017 on the tightest of margins, on second preference votes and a tiny turnout. In 2021 he won his second mandate by a landslide.
Houchen is a divisive love-him-or-hate-him figure who has been at the centre of an independent inquiry set up by the government last year into his handling of the Teesworks regeneration site. The inquiry found no evidence of corruption or illegality but did find that standards expected when managing public funds had not been met. As with the Norh East mayoral election, the outcome is impossible to predict.
Conclusion
In summary, if you want to know whether to expect a Labour general election victory, look out for Labour vote shares of 50% or more on the five Tyne & Wear councils and in the high 40% range in Hartlepool; for some seat gains by Labour from the Conservatives and/or LibDems in Sunderland; and for Labour to hold the Northumbria and Durham PCC posts with 60% or more and regain the Cleveland PCC position. As a matter of interest, see if the LibDems can continue to build on their strengths in Newcastle and Gateshead and if the Greens can do the same in South Tyneside. Finally, enjoy the fascinating mayoral contests in the Norh East and Tees Valley even if you cannot draw any wider conclusions from them.
Sources: Council websites and Wikipedia. Calculations: author.
