Parish council elections 2024 - an exhausted look

This is a light year for parish council elections - just 33 local authorities are running scheduled parish elections in 2024. As usual, most elections will be uncontested:

  • Of 795 parish wards, 136 will have a contested poll on 2nd May (17%)
  • Of 3709 candidates, 2746 have been declared elected without a poll (74%)
  • Out of a total of 4207 seats, there are only enough candidates to fill 3369 of them, with most of the remainder to be filled by co-option
  • 9 parish councils have so few nominations that they will not meet the quorum of 3 councillors, and will require fresh elections before they can sit.

Over a third of the seats to be filled this year are in Dorset, which due to reorganisation has elections at 5-year intervals in 2019, 2024 and 2029, before reverting to the usual 4-year cycle along with the other county councils.

The most hotly-contested election is for Kidderminster Town Council, where 64 candidates are standing to fill 18 seats. The outgoing council is made up of 11 Conservatives, 2 Lib Dems, 1 Labour, 1 Independent Health Concern and 3 Independents - Health Concern are not the force they once were and don't appear on this year's ballot.


The longest ballot paper this year is in Dinnington Town Council in Yorkshire, where voters will be asked to vote for up to 14 candidates from a list of 24. Having had a similar length ballot paper myself in 2019, I feel their pain (see right).

Around 600 candidates represent a political party, with most being list as Independent or giving no description. The parties with candidates include:

  • Labour (197)
  • Conservatives (196)
  • Liberal Democrats (176)
  • Green (41)
  • Reform (10 - 9 of them in Kidderminster)

Apart from the above, there is just one candidate each from the English Democrats, the Heritage Party, TUSC, UKIP, the Women's Equality Party and the Yorkshire Party.

Parish councils candidates can however list any description they like on the ballot paper (as long as it doesn't conflict with a registered party).This leads to descriptions like the following:

  • "Billericay Resident For 30 Years"
  • "Billericay Resident of 40 Years"
  • "Resident of Billericay For 42 Years" (something of a theme here)
  • "Independent Young Person"
  • "Lyme Area Energy Champion"
  • "Preserve Natural Beauty of Marshwood Vale" 
  • "Buses E-Bikes Safer Roads Nature Recovery"
  • "Farmer" (used 8 times)
  • "Surveyor / Local Business Owner / Farming Family"
  • "'New Home' Owner; Allotment Committee Member"
  • "Civil Geotechnical Engineer Arbitrator Mediator"
  • "Retired Surface Pattern Designer" (I had to look this up)
  • "Independent Democratic Socialist"
  • "No Political Party Affiliation"

Something seems to have gone wrong with the nominations for Rayleigh Town Council in Essex, where several of the candidates have their names repeated in the description column - I assume this is a case of misreading the forms, although I'm not sure how this sort of thing gets through without being noticed.

The award for best description goes to the unmistakeable Trevor Rolls:

 

And the prize for dramatic understatement goes to  Joe Deane, apparently the only member of Stanton Harcourt Parish Council to seek re-election:

 

 

 

 

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