There were three principal local council by-elections that took place on Thursday 17th February 2011. The Tories held two seats but lost one to the Lib Dems. There were no parish or town council results reported to ALDC. 
In Shrewsbury the Quarry and Coton Hill ward of Shropshire Unitary Council consists of Shrewsbury town centre plus the Coton Hill social housing estate. In the past we have represented parts of the current ward in different county divisions.
Following the Tory resignation we surveyed the ward, leafleted and canvassed hard. We knew we had to build a winning Shuttleworth so we called back three times to houses where we could not get a response to maximise our canvass contact rate.
We fought the campaign on a purely local basis. Labour did not, using national attack literature in the final week to target our vote. Our only response to this was a Labour squeeze leaflet on the social housing estate and some target mail, most of which went out before the Labour literature hit. This seems to be a pattern in many by-elections and teams need to be aware of it and have national rebuttal literature in their campaign plans, ideally pre-prepared.Another key to our success was the postal vote. Rarely our strong point in the past in Shrewsbury we “double peaked” our campaign and got more of the postal vote than usual as a result. The Tories did little and the Greens did not even stand.
Our well liked candidate Andrew Bannerman who is, before you ask, a relation of Sir Henry Cambell-Bannerman probably appealed to some previously Tory voters as a well liked local figure. All in all a well deserved gain from the Tories to add to the twenty gains off the Tories we achieved last year.
In the Kenton Ward of the London Borough of Brent there was no change and in the Bourn Ward of South Cambridgeshire we held our second place.