Votes Cast in Reading Local Elections

There has been some debate today on the Reading Post website about the recent local election results in Reading, so I thought it would be worth posting the actual votes cast across the borough of Reading. For many years I have kept tables of local election results by ward in Reading, which come in very useful when looking at trends.

Of course there were major boundary changes in some wards in 2004 but the overall votes shares for the borough as a whole are a useful indicator.

   Total votes cast in Reading Borough local elections by Party 2010 were:

           Conservative – 23,449 (35.1%)

           Labour – 20,773 (31.1%)

           Lib Dem – 17,128 (25.7%)

           Green – 4,457 (6.7%)

           UKIP – 428 (0.6%)

           Others – 510 (0.8%)

This is the fourth set of local elections in a row when the Conservatives have topped the poll across Reading and yet Labour remains (just) the largest party. At over 23,000 votes it is also the largest number of votes cast for the Conservatives in any local election since my records began in 1983. Labour continued their slow decline in vote share, which has been pretty consistent over the last ten years. The Lib Dems saw a big jump in their vote share this year but still failed to quite reach the levels they attained in 2002 and 2003.