This week, there was seven by-elections, of which one was on Wednesday.
Congratulations to Councillor Alex Drage and the local Liberal Democrat team for holding our seat in Hart, despite a strong showing from Reform UK. We were able to secure a majority of the vote, demonstrating that we are the only party who can compete against Reform UK.
Hart DC, Yateley West
Liberal Democrats (Alex Drage): 1,101 (54.7%, -20.4)
Reform UK: 562 (27.9%, new)
Conservative: 348 (17.3%, -7.5)
Liberal Democrats HOLD
Turnout: 30%
Congratulations are also due to Councillor Kevin Smith and the local Liberal Democrat team, who managed to successfully gain a seat in central Devon. We were able to secure a decisive victory, leaving Reform UK in a distant second place.
Teignbridge DC, Kenn Valley
Liberal Democrats (Kevin Smith): 1,116 (50.4%, +11.0)
Reform UK: 512 (23.1%, new)
Conservative: 212 (9.6%, -19.0)
Independent (Lake): 181 (8.2%, new)
Green Party: 122 (5.5%, -13.9)
Labour: 59 (2.7%, -9.9)
Independent (Swain): 12 (0.5%, new)
Liberal Democrat GAIN from Conservative
Turnout: 31%
Well done to Councillor Stuart Bridge and the local Liberal Democrat team, as they were able to defend our seat in Bath, leaving the Greens behind in second place.
Bath and North East Somerset UA, Widcombe and Lyncombe
Liberal Democrats (Stuart Bridge): 769 (44.4%, -11.8)
Green Party: 267 (15.4%, +0.6)
Labour: 212 (12.2%, +4.7)
Reform UK: 206 (11.9%, new)
Conservative: 149 (8.6%, -12.8)
Independent (Nolan): 83 (4.7%, new)
Independent (Blackburn): 45 (2.5%, new)
Liberal Democrats HOLD
Turnout: 35%
In Corby, Reform UK were able to secure a close-fought victory against Labour. Thank you to Alex Lock and the local team for flying the Liberal Democrat flag.
North Northamptonshire UA, Lloyds and Corby Village
Reform UK: 754 (38.5%, +1.4)
Labour: 635 (32.4%, -12.7)
Green Party: 371 (18.9%, +9.4)
Liberal Democrats (Alex Lock): 113 (5.8%, +1.5)
Conservative: 86 (4.4%, -1.6)
Reform UK HOLD
Turnout: 22.8%
In Ormskirk, the localists Our West Lancashire (OWL) were able to secure a convincing victory, with Labour, the Conservatives and Reform UK all vying for second place. Thank you to Peter Chandler and the local team for flying the Liberal Democrat flag.
West Lancashire BC, Aughton and Holborn
OWL: 704 (35.5%, +10.4)
Reform UK: 478 (24.1%, +18.6)
Labour: 385 (19.4%, -21.3)
Conservative: 295 (14.9%, -8.7)
Green Party: 78 (3.9%, -1.1)
Liberal Democrats (Peter Chandler): 42 (2.1%, new)
OWL GAIN from Labour
Turnout: 30%
In Worcestershire, Reform UK were able to secure a solid win, with the Greens far behind in second place. Thank you to Matt Jones and the local team for flying the Liberal Democrat flag.
Wychavon DC, Bretforton and Offenham
Reform UK: 357 (43.5%, new)
Green Party: 213 (25.9%, new)
Conservative: 165 (20.1%, -35.4)
Labour: 33 (4.0%, -25.9)
Liberal Democrats (Matt Jones): 31 (3.8%, -10.7)
Independent: 12 (1.5%, new)
Independent: 10 (1.2%, new)
Reform UK GAIN from Conservative
Turnout: 36%
In Teesside, Reform UK achieved their record vote share in any election, leaving everyone else far behind. Thank you to Stuart Saunders and the local team for flying the Liberal Democrat flag.
Redcar and Cleveland UA, Skelton East
Reform UK: 839 (65.3%, new)
Labour: 247 (19.2%, -10.7)
Conservative: 179 (13.9%, -29.4)
Liberal Democrats (Stuart Saunders): 19 (1.5%, -1.5)
Reform UK GAIN from Conservative
Turnout: 38.4%
Thank you to all of our candidates, agents, and campaign teams. A full summary of these results, and all other principal council by-elections, can be found on the ALDC by-elections page here.
* Liam Yip is the Campaigns and Communications Intern at ALDC
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21 Comments
Interesting to note that Redcar constituency was a Lib Dem gain as recently as 2010.
There’s research going back to the 1960s which consistently finds that negative feelings towards minorities are highest where the minorities are smallest. This is not surprising, if you never meet any members of minority groups then you rely entirely on The Media, on News which is usually bad News.
Skelton East is about as homogenous as you can get – 98% UK Born/White British and fairly poor, It would be hard to find a better place for Reform.
Quite a stunning result for Reform UK in Redcar and Cleveland. Not only did they win 65% of the vote, but turnout in the by-election was 10% higher than when the ward was contested in 2023.
Standard set of results for us. Where we are known to be in serious contention (Roughly speaking 1st or 2nd place with 30% of the vote last time) we win. Where we are not, we get squeezed – usually down to 5% or less. There is a small inbetween world, but that depends on a phenomenal team effort.
Reform’s vote share is quite stunning when you consider that the things Reform voters are particularly angry about – large scale, non-EU immigration, and small boats crossings by asylum seekers – are in large part due to the Brexit championed by Reform.
Andrew; Scratch beneath the surface of the Dublin agreement and the stats are woeful. Recipient countries never fully cooperated and still don’t. It was Johnson’s reckless adminstration that is to blame – and they are now paying a price. That support he enjoyed across the red wall in 2019 has all but evaporated – with Reform being a beneficiary of that. The labour vote is also tanking in so many of those places.
-Greg Hyde
Have you really never asked yourself why small boat crossings started after Brexit? Leaving the Dublin agreement hasn’t helped but that is not the main reason. You need to do some research (and I don’t mean facebook/youtube). Reform are taking you for a ride.
Why did small boats mostly start after Brexit? Well a big factor that many people seem to conveniently forget is that we were becoming much better at detecting and therefore preventing people from smuggling themselves on lorries or trains, which was a significant and well reported problem about 10 years ago. The small boats route appears to have originated in large part in response to how using lorries was becoming next to impossible.
People trying to smuggle themselves from France to Britain, either because they want to be fussy about which country they claim asylum in, or because they are economic migrants intending to disappear into the dark economy in the UK, is really not something that only started after Brexit. (Although to be fair, the numbers have grown over the past few years, and Brexit may well be one of a number of causes of that).
“Why did small boats mostly start after Brexit? ”
Many people are asking this question but apart from some vague reference to the Dublin agreement no one, except Simon, is attempting any rational explanation. As far as I can make out hardly any migrants were returned under this anyway. Simon may have a a point regarding the increased detection rate. But, I suspect the main reason is one of economics.
If the EU was doing as economically well, and the UK was doing as badly, as some might wish was the case, it would make far more sense for potential refugees to settle in Europe. Why would anyone choose the cloudy, wet, and colder weather of the UK rather than the warmth and sunshine of the Mediterranean?
By my reckoning the total votes cast were:-
Reform 3728
Lib Dem 3291
Labour 1577
Con 1435
Green 1051
Reform was a fairly even spread nationally, the Lib Dem confined to the South, pitifully low elsewhere.
How do we become national?
On a brighter note couple of Westminster seat projections this week have us as the official opposition with less than a hundred seats!!!!
It’s striking how little curiosity Brexit supporters show about the practical realities of what they voted for.
The Dublin Regulation wasn’t just about deportation numbers. Research consistently showed it functioned as a powerful deterrent—asylum seekers knew their applications could be traced across EU borders. But Brexit cost us something even more fundamental: access to Eurodac, the EU’s biometric database of asylum applicants and irregular migrants.
Without Eurodac, UK authorities are essentially flying blind. They can’t check fingerprints against EU records or verify whether someone has already had their claim rejected elsewhere in Europe. For failed asylum seekers, this creates a perverse incentive: reach Britain, and you can submit a completely fresh application—potentially your last realistic chance of success.
The irony is that the very people who championed “taking back control” of our borders delivered a system with far less control than we had before.
Nothing to do with the fact they are coming from a tented village in Calais – to a hotel room where all their dietary & medical needs are met. Far more than a British homeless male would ever get. These are economic migrants travelling across Europe.
@ Andrew,
It’s a bit late to be making the argument that Brexit and the loss of the Eurodac data inevitably would lead to increased levels of immigration. If Remainers are much smarter than us Leavers, as they like to claim, I’d have expected they might have had the nous to actually use that before the vote!
Maybe I just missed it but for the life of me I can’t remember any mention of the word then.
The vast majority of immigration is quite legal and Eurodac has no bearing on the levels of it.
The reason we have high levels of immigration is both because people want to come here and that we want them to. Otherwise why would we issue so many work and other visas to allow them?
We have largely “taken back control”. It’s just not worked out as many might have expected.
Correction: I should have used the term ‘regular’ rather than ‘legal’.
It’s important to accept that under the ECHR the crossing of borders without the correct documentation isn’t necessarily ‘illegal’.
– Peter Martin
I often struggle to see how your replies connect to my points, so let me clarify my argument.
Reform voters are primarily angry about two issues, though they frequently blur them together. First, the small boats situation—which Brexit significantly worsened. Second, the visible increase in non-white legal immigration to their towns (the so-called ‘Boriswave’). Again this is largely due to Brexit: our demographic needs make substantial immigration virtually inevitable, but leaving the EU simply redirected it from European to non-European countries. While I’m comfortable with large-scale non-EU immigration, Reform voters clearly are not.
The real failure here belongs to our political and media class: they’ve allowed the Reform/ Brexit Party to capitalise on anger and anxiety that Brexit itself largely created. This contradiction needs to be exposed and challenged.
@Andrew Melmoth
Allow me to join the discussion with a question (or two): why do we need large scale immigration at a time when so many of our able-bodied citizens are not economically active? It may be better for companies to source cheaper workers from abroad but is it not better for the country that jobs are filled by UK workers currently living on benefits who could be working and paying taxes?
This is not in any way an anti-immigration post – I believe we need immigrants who bring skills which are in short supply but most current immigrants are not in that category.
– Jean Melville
Because ‘economically inactive’ does not mean available to work. Once you strip out early retirees, students, carers and people too ill to work you end up with relatively few people. We’ve had full or nearly full employment for a number of years even with large-scale immigration.
The root cause of our reliance on immigration is, of course, due to the birthrate being below replacement rate since the early 1970’s. Boomers are long-lived and had relatively few children. If you want pensions, and a health and social care service then you need immigration. This doesn’t mean immigration has always been handled well or even that the numbers haven’t sometimes exceeded what was required. But pretending, as Reform do, that we could have maintained services without immigration is simply denying demographic reality.
I think I’ve said more than enough on this thread and rather knocked it off-topic so I won’t be posting here again.
@Andrew Melmoth
Thanks for replying but 1,670,000 people are signing on as unemployed and seeking work. This is far highly than just turnover as people are temporarily unemployed while changing jobs and is a far higher figure than vacancies in the economy, so I don’t think this counts as full employment.
“……so I don’t think this counts as full employment.”
No it doesn’t!
The situation is even worse than the unemployment figures show. Even if someone works for a little a one hour per week they are still classed as employed. The total picture should include levels of underemployment as well as unemployment.
According to the UK Labour Force Survey for Nov-Jan 2025, for people aged 16+ in employment, by their usual weekly hours in their main job:
Total employed (16+): 33,922,000
In the three months to July 2025, the UK unemployment rate was estimated at 4.7%. In that same period, the number of unemployed people (16+) was about 1.67 million
Those working less than 6 hours a week: ~ 1.4% of employed — which is about 474,000 people.
For June to August 2025, Vacancies were estimated at 728,000.
The Beveridge measure of full employment defines full employment as a situation where the number of job vacancies is roughly equal to the number of unemployed people.
In Beveridge’s own words (1944, Full Employment in a Free Society): “Full employment means having always more vacant jobs than unemployed men, not slightly fewer jobs.”
So, Beveridge argued for: an unemployment rate below about 3% — the “frictional” level necessary for people changing jobs.
The last time the UK had more job vacancies than unemployed individuals was in early 2022. Specifically, between January and March 2022, the number of job vacancies exceeded the number of unemployed people for the first time since records began. During this period, the unemployment rate fell to just 3.7%, and there were approximately 1.3 million job vacancies.
Migration has minimal impact on job stats. Woking age migrants create jobs with their production and spending.
@ Joe,
I’m sure what you say is technically correct. However, the situation has changed since Beveridge considered that it was only men who should be considered as either employed or not employed. Many women would probably like to work but don’t because of family reasons and wouldn’t receive benefits anyway. They are also far less likely to be counted as unemployed.
So trying to get a handle on the degree of real unemployment (including underemployment) is difficult and relies on arbitrary cut off points and limits.
In Beveridge’s time there wouldn’t have been the same issue of long term unemployment. We have to recognise that some workers are difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to employ. This can be caused by long term unemployment itself especially if that has led to them become involved in criminal activities .
So I would expect that the number of job vacancies will greater that the number of employable people which are included in the 1.6 million. However it will be less than the total number of the real unemployed. This includes those who aren’t counted in the total for various reasons and who may be wanting more hours than they are offered.
You are right that migration doesn’t affect the levels of unemployment but it does have a depressing effect on wage levels. This is why some of the right wing groupings both here and elsewhere do favour the idea of open borders. It’s more motivated by profitability and capitalism than liberalism.