By Liverpool Liberal Democrat leader Cllr Carl Cashman
In 27 years, Labour had not lost a single by-election in Liverpool – whilst the Lib Dems came close quite a few times, we always fell short. Even at our height in the mid-2000s, when we had the largest Liberal group in Europe, we could muster the forces to defeat Labour in a by-election. That’s why when we were faced with defending one of the seats in early 2025, we had to do everything we could to ensure we beat Labour and won big!
Where were we fighting?
Much Woolton and Hunts Cross was a new ward for 2023. It’s a two-member ward with about 9,500 voters. In 2023, we won it with 1,993 and 1,562 votes compared to Labour’s 1132 and 843. By December 2024, one of the councillors had resigned from the Liberal Democrats after joining 15-minute city protests, and the other needed to step down from the council for health reasons. We were going to face this by-election under challenging circumstances.
How did we run our campaign?
We made sure to hit the ground running straight away. We went out delivering leaflets, whatever the weather, and held regular canvassing sessions every night of the week and twice on weekends. By breaking the ward down into turfs and targeting postal voters and the marked register on Connect, we focused on key voters who we thought might turn out in a cold winter by-election.
We’d previously sent out a mailing to all the older people in Liverpool about Labour’s Winter Fuel Allowance cut and received a massive response from our survey. We knew that it was going to be a big issue. Also, our candidate, Josie Mullen, led a campaign to bring together retailers and local charities to provide winter warmer packs to pensioners at risk of going cold this winter. This made it a significant issue to remind voters how Labour had let them down and showed that our candidate had taken action.
We knew parking was a big issue across the ward because we’d worked hard all year round and kept in touch with residents through surveys. There were areas with narrow streets where pavement parking caused issues and others where the council had introduced new parking restrictions around schools. We went hard on this issue, first holding a public meeting before the by-election and then writing a letter just on parking.
Our significant three issues that we repeated to residents, again and again, were:
1) Labour had let our area down
2) we had the plan to tackle rogue parking in our area
3) we were going to tackle fly-tipping and littering in the ward
We made sure to repeat them in all our literature. When we were writing direct mail, we made sure to localise it as much as possible – including people’s street names and the localities (Woolton and Hunts Cross) but recognising that there were different areas with different issues, we could hit home that Josie understood the ward and its problems. We produced eight area-specific leaflets focusing on defined communities to double down on this localisation.
The result?
We won with 51%, and the Labour Party got a measly 27%. Reform ended with 11%, the Greens with 8.6%, and the Conservatives with 2%. All the Parties’ vote shares were down except Reform. Despite the Greens and Reform making an effort to break ground in the ward, we made sure to have a strong and repeated squeeze message—it’s hardworking local Lib Dem or Labour here.
For such a big turnout of Reform voters, they didn’t show up in our canvassing returns. Be wary of the Reforms voters; you might not see them coming, but they will be there in every ward, and if you don’t squeeze them seriously, they could stop you from winning. Don’t make the mistake of thinking some of our voters won’t vote for Reform.
What’s next?
In Liverpool, we see this by-election as a springboard to show voters across the city that there is a credible alternative to the Labour Party. We are getting out there, knocking on doors, and using this opportunity to recruit new members and supporters.
We have a new councillor who has already gotten stuck in with our group and council business. Just a few weeks after her election, she has already supported residents at a demonstration to protect the Marie Curie Hospice in her new ward!
I hope you take away from this that you should never be afraid to grab an opportunity and run with it. If our past experiences had guided us, we’d have called it quits early on and said we couldn’t win, so why bother? Instead, we saw this as a fantastic opportunity to build momentum and keep our campaign going into our next set of local elections in 2027.