Labour retain control of Exeter City Council
13 seats were up for grabs
Labour have kept control of Exeter City Council with an increased majority, but it was an Independent win in Heavitree that shared the limelight as the city went to the polls.
Labour gained Topsham from the Conservatives and St Thomas and Pinhoe from Independents, but lost the Newtown and St Leonards seat to the Greens and Heavitree to independent Lucy Haigh.
She had campaigned against the city’s controversial Low Traffic Neighbourhood scheme, which has put Heavitree in the headlines in recent months.
She said she was delighted to have been elected and hoped to take the message of the protesters against the car ban to the council chamber.
13 of the city council’s 39 seats were up for grabs.
The Liberal Democrats also had reason to be cheerful after snatching Duryard and St James from Labour. Council leader Phil Bialyk retained his seat in Exwick by a comfortable margin of nearly 700 votes.
He said it showed that the people of Exeter understood what Labour was trying to do on behalf of residents. “We are the political adults in the room,” he said. “We have to look towards Exeter’s future and we are not just about one issue.”
The first ballot boxes arrived at the Riverside Leisure Centre a few minutes after 10pm and a small army of counters got to work verifying the papers and then getting down to the business of counting them.
Party activists with coloured rosettes sat opposite the counters, watching the piles of papers mount.
Candidates paced the hall, taking stock of their progress. Young Green Party candidate Jack Vickers, standing for the Pennsylvania ward, cut an unmissable figure in his vivid green suit.
Yellow and green voting papers tumbled out of the big black ballot boxes as they were emptied – yellow for the police and crime commissioner election and green for the city council. They had to be carefully separated before counting could begin in earnest.
Early predictions were that it could be 1.30am before the first result was declared, but in fact it was 2.45am before returning officer Bindu Arjoon, the city council’s chief executive, declared that Cllr Bialyk had successfully defended his Exwick seat for Labour.
And there was an early success for the Greens, with the first batch of results also containing a win for the party in Newton and St Leonards, where Lynn Wetenhall convincingly took the seat from Labour.