Full recount underway at Runcorn by-election as Reform UK 'tipped Labour by four votes' after Mike Amesbury scandal
2 May 2025, 04:13 | Updated: 2 May 2025, 04:23
A full recount is underway at the Runcorn by-election, as Reform chairman Zia Yusuf says his party 'won by four votes'.
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The race between Reform's Sarah Pochin and Labour candidate Karen Shore was separated by just four votes, as a full recount has begun.
"Provisional announcement from Runcorn & Helsby is Reform wins by four votes," Zia Yusuf, who is present at the vote count at the Halton Stadium in Widnes, said.
"Labour has demanded a full recount. Here we go again," he added.
A full recount will take a number of hours, and considering the very small margin, it is likely there will be more than one recount.
The contest to become the new MP for Runcorn and Helsby is the first by-election under Keir Starmer's leadership, and is hugely important for both Reform and Labour.
The vote was triggered after former Labour MP Mike Amesbury quit the party after admitting punching a constituent in the street, which was caught on CCTV.
Amesbury pleaded guilty to assaulting constituent Paul Fellows, 45, after a row in the street in Frodsham, Cheshire, in January, for which he was given a suspended sentence.
Amesbury won his seat last year with a majority of 14,696 over Reform UK, and his resignation became the first by-election test for Sir Keir Starmer's Labour Party.
It comes as a number of by-elections are being held across England, and Reform UK is contesting nearly all of them.
More than 1,600 council seats are up for grabs across 23 local authorities, while four regional mayors and two local mayors will be elected.
At the last local elections in 2024, Reform only put forward candidates in 12% of all available council seats. This year, Farage said the party is deploying nearly a "full list of candidates across the entire country".
The leader of the right-wing populist party, Nigel Farage, said he wanted to “smash the two-party system”.
Reform does not currently run any councils, but critics and supporters alike will be eager to see how they will run local authorities if they do win councils and mayoral contests.
The level of votes they receive at the local level will also be a major electoral test for the party, which has publicly spoken about their ambitions to win the next general election and run the country.
Most of the council seats were last contested in May 2021, at a time when the then-Conservative government, led by former prime minister Boris Johnson, was enjoying a spike in popularity following the successful rollout of the first Covid-19 vaccines.
This means the Tories are defending a large number of seats across much of the country: they currently control 19 of the 23 local authorities holding elections on Thursday, either as the majority party or a minority administration.
