Post by Robert Waller on Sept 25, 2023 21:22:45 GMT
Credit for boundary change analysis by Pete Whitehead
New Town seats have moved away from the Labour party in recent decades - and Bracknell was never one of their more fruitful New Towns to start with. Since the creation of Bracknell council, first as a non-metropolitan district within Berkshire and since 1997 as a unitary authority (‘Bracknell Forest’), before May 2023 Labour had only held control at municipal level twice, after the elections of 1973 (the very first contests) and 1995 (the height of unsullied New Labour and Blair promise). In 2022, for example, the Conservatives held 37 of the 42 seats on Bracknell Forest council, with Labour just four. They have never held the parliamentary seat that includes the town, and have never seemed further away than In December 2019, when the new Tory candidate James Sunderland won with a majority of 19,829. Then in the 2023 all-out Bracknell Forest council elections, on revised boundaries, Labour gained 18 seats and the Tories lost no fewer than 28. Labour took back the control that had eluded them for 26 years. Could this possibly lead to hopes of their first ever parliamentary victory in this part of Berkshire?
Despite its modern appearance, Bracknell was actually designated as one of the original batch of New Towns in 1948, after the report of the enquiry of the Reith Committee which sat between 1945 to 1947 to discuss the post-war settlement of major housing issues. It was not initially intended to be as large scale a new community as, say, Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage or Crawley, with an initial target population of just 25,000. However there have been subsequent waves of expansion and further development of the local plan, and by the 2021 census its population was over 78,000.
As time has passed the original New Town aim of a mixture of class and residential neighbourhoods has been diluted. Labour’s strongest neighbourhoods have tended to be the older ones, with their only victories in May 2019, for example, coming in Great Hollands North and, in a split result, in Priestwood/Garth in its north-western quadrant (still with 33% social housing in Priestwood MSOA in the 2021 census). They also gained an Old Bracknell councillor convincingly in a December 2021 byelection. Newer neighbourhoods tend to the strongly Tory. The nature of the industry attracted has also changed with the decades. Bracknell became a centre of high-tech, communications and computing industries. Here are represented 3M, Panasonic, Fujitsu (formerly ICL), Dell, Hewlett Packard, Micron Technology and Honeywell, while British Aerospace manufacturing disappeared in the 1980s. Some have nominated Bracknell as a major centre of an M4 ‘Silicon Corridor’. The Met Office was based here too, before its ‘devolved’ move down to Exeter in 2003. All in all, the type of employment available in Bracknell has been relatively white-collar, well-paid, less likely to be unionized – and less likely to be correlated with Labour voting preference. The census figures are bound to be out of date, but the ranking of the Bracknell seat among the very highest as regards economic activity and adults in full time employment is unlikely to have changed significantly. This is a comfortably prosperous part of south east England.
In the early years after the Second World War, the expanding Bracknell area was part of the Wokingham seat, then covering the parts of Berkshire east of Reading and west of Windsor. By 1979 Berkshire’s electorate had expanded sufficiently to gain a seventh and extra seat, with the not entirely geographically accurate name of East Berkshire (which already had an electorate of over 82,000 in 1982, a year before its first contest, as Bracknell’s growth continued). East Berkshire’s existence lasted for four elections, till 1997, when Bracknell first received recognition in the name of a constituency. Just like Wokingham, East Berkshire had always been safely Conservative, and in 1997 its MP Andrew Mackay seamlessly extended his tenure, which lasted till 2010. In fact the only change of tenure came when Mackay’s successor, Philip Lee, crossed the floor to join the Liberal Democrats during a speech by Boris Johnson on Brexit in September 2019. However disdaining any incumbency advantage, Lee contested the neighbouring Wokingham in the December 2019 general election. He polled a very respectable 37% against arch-Brexiteer John Redwood there, but in Bracknell constituency the Liberal Democrats got less than 15% and finished third. It is probably not coincidental that Bracknell is estimated to have voted 53% to leave the EU in 2016, while Wokingham favoured Remain by around 57% to 43%.
It should also be noted that Bracknell (new) town has never been large enough to complete a seat on its own, and still isn’t. In the version that has even extant since 2010, the boundaries loop south through the endemic pine woods of his part of Berkshire to include the communities of Sandhurst and Crowthorne, and south west to add three wards from Wokingham district – Finchampstead North and South, and Wokingham Without (a splendid historic appellation that always stirs one to ponder – without what?). Sandhurst and Crowthorne in particular are home to some prominent British institutions. Some of these are even recognized in the names of wards: College Town includes the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, since 1801 the most famous training ground of the officers of the British Army. There is also Wellington College, a secondary boarding school also with a long-standing military flavour, although that has changed in the 21st century not least because of the efforts of probably the most well known headmaster in the country, Anthony Seldon, who ruled here from 2006 to 2015 (and being knighted in 2014) before moving on to the University of Buckingham (and for 2023-24 back to a school, Epsom College, following the tragic death of its headmistress). Wellington College is actually nearer Crowthorne rather than Sandhurst, and in Crowthorne itself is to be found the third institution, Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where famous residents have included Ronald Kray and ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, Peter Sutcliffe the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and Christiana Edmunds the ‘Chocolate Cream Poisoner’, and Richard Dadd, the artist.
Whether many of the residents of the three institutions actually vote in significant numbers is a moot point. In any case all the extraneous wards to Bracknell New Town itself have usually been very safely Conservative, although the Liberal Democrats finished a reasonably close second in Central Sandhurst in May 2019, and were much more competitive in the more hospitable Wokingham borough, even gaining Finchampstead South in the favourable circumstances of May 2022.
However in the most recent boundary changes proposed in the Commission's initial, revised and final reports as Berkshire and its neighbouring counties have continued to grow, the three Wokingham wards have been removed from Bracknell and placed in Wokingham itself. On the other hand one ward was added: Warfield Harvest Ride, currently in Windsor – which despite its rather delightful rural name is in fact a contiguous part of the newer, and almost entirely privately owned, Bracknell residential estate developments, and indeed one of the few wards of Bracknell Forest council currently outside this constituency. Berkshire is entitled to nine seats and a new seat is created in the centre of the county, in the Reading suburbs. Most of the remaining constituencies remain more or less intact but with varying degrees of changes to accomodate the new seat.
In the case of Bracknell this involves removing 15,000 voters in the Wokingham district part of the seat (Finchampstead and Wokingham Without) and replacing them with aroun6 6,000 in the Warfield Harvest Ride ward (currently in Windsor). This is part of the built up area of Bracknell itself which now provides over 50,000 of the 70,000 or so voters of the seat bearing its name. This does of course increase the Labour share and reduce the Conservative majority a bit, but does not make it close to marginal
On notional figures for December 2019, the Bracknell seat would remain fairly equally safe against Labour in second place, while slightly weakening the Liberal Democrat position in third. Then came that May 2023 local election shock. Labour won almost all the ‘Bracknell Town’ wards, of whatever vintage housing, in straight fights with the Conservatives, while in a rumoured pact, the Liberal Democrats gained Sandhurst, one of the Crowthorne seats and one in Owlsmoor & College Town, and the new ward of Swinley Forest around Martin’s Heron. Within the revised boundaries of Bracknell constituency, the Tories won only Whitegrove (really the successor to the Warfield Harvest Ride brought in from Windsor constituency), and some of those in the south of the seat in the Sandhurst and Owlsmoor & College Town wards, divided with the LDs. As will be seen from Pete Whitehead’s analysis, reproduced below with thanks, the notional effects are somewhat favourable to Labour but unlikely to be decisive.
Because of the candidature pattern, with Labour (like the Lib Dems) not standing in parts of the seat, the Conservatives still received more votes under the new boundaries even in May 2023, by about 2,000 or 9%. This is on the surface a highly unconvincing lead. It should be remembered that those were of course local government contests, and removed the Tories from control of Bracknell Forest council not the United Kingdom, in the midterm of Rishi Sunak’s administration and on a turnout of around 30%. Nevertheless there can be expected a more spirited contest than usual in the burgeoning housing between the trees of the forests of Windsor and Swinley, with at the least a strong swing to Labour in prospect.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 14.4% 455/575
Owner occupied 65.9% 292/575
Private rented 16.1% 381/575
Social rented 18.0% 199/575
White 85.7% 353/575
Black 2.6% 201/575
Asian 7.4% 212/575
Managerial & professional 39.7% 114/575
Routine & Semi-routine 20.3% 407/575
Degree level 34.2% 229/575
No qualifications 13.6% 488/575
Students 5.4% 314/575
General Election 2019: Bracknell
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative James Sunderland 31,894 58.7 -0.1
Labour Paul Bidwell 12,065 22.2 -8.0
Liberal Democrats Kaweh Beheshtizadeh 7,749 14.3 +6.8
Green Derek Florey 2,089 3.8 New
Independent Olivio Barreto 553 1.0 +0.2
C Majority 19,829 36.5 +7.9
2019 Electorate: 79,206
Turnout 54,350 68.6 -2.0
Conservative hold
Swing 3.9 Lab to C
Boundary Changes
Bracknell will consist of
81.1% of Bracknell
7.8% of Windsor
Maps
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/south-east/South%20East_294_Bracknell_Portrait.pdf
Bracknell Forest new ward boundary map
www.bracknell-forest.gov.uk/elections-and-voting/ward-maps
Notional result 2019 on the new boundaries (Rallings & Thrasher)
New Town seats have moved away from the Labour party in recent decades - and Bracknell was never one of their more fruitful New Towns to start with. Since the creation of Bracknell council, first as a non-metropolitan district within Berkshire and since 1997 as a unitary authority (‘Bracknell Forest’), before May 2023 Labour had only held control at municipal level twice, after the elections of 1973 (the very first contests) and 1995 (the height of unsullied New Labour and Blair promise). In 2022, for example, the Conservatives held 37 of the 42 seats on Bracknell Forest council, with Labour just four. They have never held the parliamentary seat that includes the town, and have never seemed further away than In December 2019, when the new Tory candidate James Sunderland won with a majority of 19,829. Then in the 2023 all-out Bracknell Forest council elections, on revised boundaries, Labour gained 18 seats and the Tories lost no fewer than 28. Labour took back the control that had eluded them for 26 years. Could this possibly lead to hopes of their first ever parliamentary victory in this part of Berkshire?
Despite its modern appearance, Bracknell was actually designated as one of the original batch of New Towns in 1948, after the report of the enquiry of the Reith Committee which sat between 1945 to 1947 to discuss the post-war settlement of major housing issues. It was not initially intended to be as large scale a new community as, say, Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage or Crawley, with an initial target population of just 25,000. However there have been subsequent waves of expansion and further development of the local plan, and by the 2021 census its population was over 78,000.
As time has passed the original New Town aim of a mixture of class and residential neighbourhoods has been diluted. Labour’s strongest neighbourhoods have tended to be the older ones, with their only victories in May 2019, for example, coming in Great Hollands North and, in a split result, in Priestwood/Garth in its north-western quadrant (still with 33% social housing in Priestwood MSOA in the 2021 census). They also gained an Old Bracknell councillor convincingly in a December 2021 byelection. Newer neighbourhoods tend to the strongly Tory. The nature of the industry attracted has also changed with the decades. Bracknell became a centre of high-tech, communications and computing industries. Here are represented 3M, Panasonic, Fujitsu (formerly ICL), Dell, Hewlett Packard, Micron Technology and Honeywell, while British Aerospace manufacturing disappeared in the 1980s. Some have nominated Bracknell as a major centre of an M4 ‘Silicon Corridor’. The Met Office was based here too, before its ‘devolved’ move down to Exeter in 2003. All in all, the type of employment available in Bracknell has been relatively white-collar, well-paid, less likely to be unionized – and less likely to be correlated with Labour voting preference. The census figures are bound to be out of date, but the ranking of the Bracknell seat among the very highest as regards economic activity and adults in full time employment is unlikely to have changed significantly. This is a comfortably prosperous part of south east England.
In the early years after the Second World War, the expanding Bracknell area was part of the Wokingham seat, then covering the parts of Berkshire east of Reading and west of Windsor. By 1979 Berkshire’s electorate had expanded sufficiently to gain a seventh and extra seat, with the not entirely geographically accurate name of East Berkshire (which already had an electorate of over 82,000 in 1982, a year before its first contest, as Bracknell’s growth continued). East Berkshire’s existence lasted for four elections, till 1997, when Bracknell first received recognition in the name of a constituency. Just like Wokingham, East Berkshire had always been safely Conservative, and in 1997 its MP Andrew Mackay seamlessly extended his tenure, which lasted till 2010. In fact the only change of tenure came when Mackay’s successor, Philip Lee, crossed the floor to join the Liberal Democrats during a speech by Boris Johnson on Brexit in September 2019. However disdaining any incumbency advantage, Lee contested the neighbouring Wokingham in the December 2019 general election. He polled a very respectable 37% against arch-Brexiteer John Redwood there, but in Bracknell constituency the Liberal Democrats got less than 15% and finished third. It is probably not coincidental that Bracknell is estimated to have voted 53% to leave the EU in 2016, while Wokingham favoured Remain by around 57% to 43%.
It should also be noted that Bracknell (new) town has never been large enough to complete a seat on its own, and still isn’t. In the version that has even extant since 2010, the boundaries loop south through the endemic pine woods of his part of Berkshire to include the communities of Sandhurst and Crowthorne, and south west to add three wards from Wokingham district – Finchampstead North and South, and Wokingham Without (a splendid historic appellation that always stirs one to ponder – without what?). Sandhurst and Crowthorne in particular are home to some prominent British institutions. Some of these are even recognized in the names of wards: College Town includes the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, since 1801 the most famous training ground of the officers of the British Army. There is also Wellington College, a secondary boarding school also with a long-standing military flavour, although that has changed in the 21st century not least because of the efforts of probably the most well known headmaster in the country, Anthony Seldon, who ruled here from 2006 to 2015 (and being knighted in 2014) before moving on to the University of Buckingham (and for 2023-24 back to a school, Epsom College, following the tragic death of its headmistress). Wellington College is actually nearer Crowthorne rather than Sandhurst, and in Crowthorne itself is to be found the third institution, Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where famous residents have included Ronald Kray and ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, Peter Sutcliffe the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and Christiana Edmunds the ‘Chocolate Cream Poisoner’, and Richard Dadd, the artist.
Whether many of the residents of the three institutions actually vote in significant numbers is a moot point. In any case all the extraneous wards to Bracknell New Town itself have usually been very safely Conservative, although the Liberal Democrats finished a reasonably close second in Central Sandhurst in May 2019, and were much more competitive in the more hospitable Wokingham borough, even gaining Finchampstead South in the favourable circumstances of May 2022.
However in the most recent boundary changes proposed in the Commission's initial, revised and final reports as Berkshire and its neighbouring counties have continued to grow, the three Wokingham wards have been removed from Bracknell and placed in Wokingham itself. On the other hand one ward was added: Warfield Harvest Ride, currently in Windsor – which despite its rather delightful rural name is in fact a contiguous part of the newer, and almost entirely privately owned, Bracknell residential estate developments, and indeed one of the few wards of Bracknell Forest council currently outside this constituency. Berkshire is entitled to nine seats and a new seat is created in the centre of the county, in the Reading suburbs. Most of the remaining constituencies remain more or less intact but with varying degrees of changes to accomodate the new seat.
In the case of Bracknell this involves removing 15,000 voters in the Wokingham district part of the seat (Finchampstead and Wokingham Without) and replacing them with aroun6 6,000 in the Warfield Harvest Ride ward (currently in Windsor). This is part of the built up area of Bracknell itself which now provides over 50,000 of the 70,000 or so voters of the seat bearing its name. This does of course increase the Labour share and reduce the Conservative majority a bit, but does not make it close to marginal
On notional figures for December 2019, the Bracknell seat would remain fairly equally safe against Labour in second place, while slightly weakening the Liberal Democrat position in third. Then came that May 2023 local election shock. Labour won almost all the ‘Bracknell Town’ wards, of whatever vintage housing, in straight fights with the Conservatives, while in a rumoured pact, the Liberal Democrats gained Sandhurst, one of the Crowthorne seats and one in Owlsmoor & College Town, and the new ward of Swinley Forest around Martin’s Heron. Within the revised boundaries of Bracknell constituency, the Tories won only Whitegrove (really the successor to the Warfield Harvest Ride brought in from Windsor constituency), and some of those in the south of the seat in the Sandhurst and Owlsmoor & College Town wards, divided with the LDs. As will be seen from Pete Whitehead’s analysis, reproduced below with thanks, the notional effects are somewhat favourable to Labour but unlikely to be decisive.
Because of the candidature pattern, with Labour (like the Lib Dems) not standing in parts of the seat, the Conservatives still received more votes under the new boundaries even in May 2023, by about 2,000 or 9%. This is on the surface a highly unconvincing lead. It should be remembered that those were of course local government contests, and removed the Tories from control of Bracknell Forest council not the United Kingdom, in the midterm of Rishi Sunak’s administration and on a turnout of around 30%. Nevertheless there can be expected a more spirited contest than usual in the burgeoning housing between the trees of the forests of Windsor and Swinley, with at the least a strong swing to Labour in prospect.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 14.4% 455/575
Owner occupied 65.9% 292/575
Private rented 16.1% 381/575
Social rented 18.0% 199/575
White 85.7% 353/575
Black 2.6% 201/575
Asian 7.4% 212/575
Managerial & professional 39.7% 114/575
Routine & Semi-routine 20.3% 407/575
Degree level 34.2% 229/575
No qualifications 13.6% 488/575
Students 5.4% 314/575
General Election 2019: Bracknell
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative James Sunderland 31,894 58.7 -0.1
Labour Paul Bidwell 12,065 22.2 -8.0
Liberal Democrats Kaweh Beheshtizadeh 7,749 14.3 +6.8
Green Derek Florey 2,089 3.8 New
Independent Olivio Barreto 553 1.0 +0.2
C Majority 19,829 36.5 +7.9
2019 Electorate: 79,206
Turnout 54,350 68.6 -2.0
Conservative hold
Swing 3.9 Lab to C
Boundary Changes
Bracknell will consist of
81.1% of Bracknell
7.8% of Windsor
Maps
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/south-east/South%20East_294_Bracknell_Portrait.pdf
Bracknell Forest new ward boundary map
www.bracknell-forest.gov.uk/elections-and-voting/ward-maps
Notional result 2019 on the new boundaries (Rallings & Thrasher)
| Con | 26022 | 55.5% |
| Lab | 11893 | 25.4% |
| LD | 6555 | 14.0% |
| Grn | 1865 | 4.0% |
| Oth | 553 | 1.2% |
| Majority | 14129 | 30.1% |
