29 April 2005
The local government landscape is expected to take on a bluer hue on May 5 as the Conservatives aim to capture more councils from Labour in the forgotten election.
With all eyes on the national poll, little attention has been paid to the 2,203 county council seats up for grabs. But the main parties believe significant changes are afoot.
The Conservatives were buoyant as they entered the last few days of the campaign. Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, the Tory chair of the Local Government Association and leader of Kent County Council, said all three main parties concurred that the Tories were likely to make significant gains.
'It's a fact that Conservative county councils have a very strong track record under the Comprehensive Performance Assessment of producing better services at a low cost,' he told Public Finance.
The Tories already control 17 counties and top of their hit list is Labour-controlled Northamptonshire, where they should be rewarded with control of the council, Bruce-Lockhart claimed.
The Tories also expect to knock Labour-controlled Northumberland into No Overall Control and perform strongly in Devon (NOC) and Labour-held Lancashire.
The Labour Party was in gloomy mood and confirmed the picture painted by the Tories. 'Historically, counties are not where we've done well,' one Labour insider told PF.
Derbyshire and Durham are the only counties of the seven Labour controls that it is confident of holding. 'We'll probably also keep Nottinghamshire, but we have done supremely badly in all the districts there where there has been a very strong push from independent candidates,' the Labour source said.
Suffolk – where Labour has been in minority control along with the Liberal Democrats – is also expected to be lost to the Tories.
However, the LibDems are pointing out that the Tory poll lead has flat-lined over the last four years.
Although not expecting to win outright control of any county, the LibDems are confident that they will capture a larger share of the vote and enough seats to push several Conservative counties into no overall control. 'Councils where our numbers will be up – and as a result where we will probably topple Tory administrations – are Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, East Sussex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Leicestershire,' a party official claimed.
In addition to England's 34 county councils, all the seats in three unitary authorities are up for election: the Isle of Wight, the Isles of Scilly and Stockton-on-Tees. In Bristol, another unitary authority, 23 of the council's 70 seats are being contested.
Four directly elected mayors are also up for election, including the mayor of Hartlepool, a job notoriously won in 2002 by the local football team mascot H'Angus the Monkey, otherwise known as Stuart Drummond. The former call centre worker is standing again.
The other three mayoral incumbents are also standing for re-election. They are: Labour's Martin Winter in Doncaster, Conservative Linda Arkley in North Tyneside and the independent Mike Wolfe in Stoke-on-Trent.
PFapr2005
