Senior Returning Officer Jonathan Davies published some of these figures in a comment thread, but as they’re likely to be of some interest, here they are with some extra detail:
Eastern 42.7% (-1.6% on last time)
East Midlands 49.1 (+1.9)
London 50.9 (+2.3)
North East 63.9 (-2.7)
North West 57.9 (-0.7)
South East 45.4 (-3.8)
South West 50.3 (+6.4)
West Midlands 62.4 (+6.2)
Yorkshire & the Humber 49.4 (+3.2)
Average 52.4 (+0.9)



7 Comments
Mark’s average is the mean of the turnout figures for the nine regions. The actual England wide overall turnout figure is 50.1%, compared with 48.9% in 2003
Any one any idea why the South West and West Midlands had such an increase in turnout, or why the South East had a drop?
And the figure for Yorkshire and the Humber would have increased by more than 3.2% if the party had actually bothered to send me a ballot paper.
Of course the party being too lazy to post you a ballot paper is one explanation Jamie 🙂
But there’s a range of others. Did you check that your membership was valid and qualified you to vote in the selection (12 months continuous membership)?
It’s a shame you seem to have missed this post if you’re an LDV reader Jamie, as that could have warned you that ballot papers should have arrived.
Also, if you have given the party a working email address for our membership records, we’ll have sent you several emails about the process – including information about how to ask for replacement ballot papers if the ballot mailing didn’t arrive.
(For people not on the internet, there was also other publicity about the selection happening).
2- The last Radical, I have read that at least in Eastern England and North West some people didn’t receive their ballot papers. If there were regional differences, this might explain why the turnout dropped in some regions.
Despite a fairly uncontroversial race with Fiona always very likely to win, the North East yet again showed it is a region with a positive membership, who are ery involved. I believe that it is one of the few regions where membership hs increased in the last year.
The drop in the South East may be partly due to the fact that Chris Huhne was running for re-election last time and ran an impressive campaign to win the top spot.
I got the impression that there were far more active campaigns in the East and West Midlands this time compared to last.