23AUG

Labour takes Penistone East from Reform

2 min read

19:09UTC

Labour won Penistone East on 20 August with 1,728 votes to Reform UK's 795, in a ward that returned three members in May.

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PoliticsAssessed

Key takeaway

Labour won Penistone East by 28 points, in a ward whose May result offers no comparable baseline.

A ward that elected three councillors in May chose one on 20 August, and Labour won it. Penistone East on Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council went from Reform UK to Labour by 1,728 votes to 795, a margin of 28 points on 3,339 ballots, or 51.8% against 23.8% ¹.

Penistone is a town in the South Yorkshire borough of Barnsley, and the seat came to Reform on 7 May in the round that returned 1,448 Reform councillors across 14 English councils . That May contest elected three members, which is the reason no swing figure appears here ². Where each elector holds three votes, a party's share blends plumping, split tickets and preferences between individual candidates into one number. Set that against a single vacancy and the swing you get describes the counting rules rather than the electorate.

Thursday's paper still says something plain: Labour won a seat Reform held going in, and won it comfortably. The committee arithmetic follows without waiting for a comparison. Places and scrutiny chairs on Barnsley are allocated by group size, and this reallocation at least came from a poll, unlike the councillor attrition Mark Pack has been tracking since May , which moves the same places with nobody voting.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Most council wards elect one councillor, but some, including Penistone East, elect three at once from a single ballot where voters can choose up to three candidates. That all-up contest happened in May. August's by-election filled just one seat that fell vacant since then, contested as a normal single-seat race. Because the ballot structure is different, comparing the two results directly, the way you would for a simple rematch between the same two candidates, does not produce a meaningful number.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Multi-member wards elect several councillors at once from a single ballot on which each voter can back as many candidates as there are seats. A later by-election to fill one vacant seat is fought as a single-seat contest with a different ballot structure and a different, usually smaller, field of candidates.

The two contests are not measuring the same thing, which is why no conventional share change applies to Penistone East, even though both elections happened in the same ward.

What could happen next?

Meaning
Penistone East's result cannot be filed alongside the single-vacancy wards in this set without a caveat about the different ballot structure.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Consensus view: The Elections Centre's long-running Local Elections Handbook, compiled by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, treats multi-member ward by-elections as non-comparable to that ward's earlier all-up result, because a single vacancy is contested against a different, usually smaller, field than the several seats filled together at the original poll.

Penistone East elected three councillors in May, so a like-for-like swing figure for the August vacancy cannot legitimately be produced.

Counter-view: Labour's 1,728 votes to Reform's 795, 51.8% against 23.8% of 3,339 valid votes, are still informative even without a certified swing figure. They show Labour comfortably ahead in this specific single-seat matchup, whatever the earlier three-seat result looked like.

Key tension: Whether the absence of a computable swing should stop comparisons between Penistone East and the single-vacancy wards in this same set of results, or whether the raw vote shares are comparable enough regardless.

Sources:PollCheck·Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council·Ayes To The Right

Mentions:Labour Party →Reform UK →Barnsley →Mark Pack →

First Reported In

Update #16 · Reform loses three wards, wins Clacton

PollCheck· 23 Aug 2026

Read original →

Different Perspectives

Ian Davidson, Acting Returning Officer for Clacton

Davidson's office printed a 90cm ballot paper for the record 34-candidate field, with nothing in electoral law capping candidate numbers or the £500 deposit each pays. He expects the paper's size to raise printing costs and slow the count into the early hours, a strain that follows from the major parties' boycott, not from turnout.

Scottish Labour members

Members now choose between Michael Marra and Joe Fagan after Monica Lennon fell one MP nomination short of the three-MP, three-MSP threshold, a bar set by MPs and union officials rather than the wider membership. Whoever wins takes office having faced only one rival on the members' ballot.

Labour Party

Labour gained Penistone East from Reform on 20 August but lost Harraby South to Reform the same night, a wash that undercuts any claim of momentum. The party can point to beating Reform in a genuinely fought contest, but not to a pattern running only in its favour.

Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats took two of Reform's May wards, Almondbury on 13 August and St Neots Eynesbury on 20 August, the latter on a 29.8-point rise in their own vote share. Both results let the party claim it is the beneficiary when voters turn against Reform, not Labour or the Conservatives.

Reform UK

Reform UK can point to winning Clacton unopposed by the other major parties and to taking Harraby South from Labour, a ward it had never previously contested. That gives the party two results to cite even as three previously held wards changed hands elsewhere in August.

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd ruled out a Stormont walkout on 11 August despite calling the DUP increasingly difficult to work with, closing a question Conor Murphy had left open a fortnight earlier. Only Sinn Féin or the DUP can collapse the joint First Minister office, so the denial gives up the party's own leverage in budget talks.