“Labour holds ward in Barking & Dagenham” may sound like the definition of a “dog bites man” electoral incident, but there were several interesting features of Thursday’s council by-election result in the borough.
Thames View ward is in the south west of Barking & Dagenham. Its northern border is the A13 road and part of the railway line that runs between the town of Barking and Dagenham Dock. Much of the area was marshland until comparatively recently.
The Thames View estate, around Bastable Avenue, was built in the late 1950s by the then Barking Borough Council as a southern extension of Barking. South of that, around the place labelled Creekmouth on maps, there is a large area occupied by light industrial and warehouse usage. By Galleons Drive in the south east of the ward there is an area of newer housing – the ward’s share of the Barking Riverside development. A new block of flats in De Pass Gardens went up in flames there in June 2019.
The name of the ward is not entirely satisfactory. As psephologist Adam Gray commented: “You’ll need binoculars and be atop a high rise block to view the Thames from here.” However, it is the name for the estate that supplies most, although not all, of the ward’s population.
Barking & Dagenham’s former Thames ward had become grossly oversized by the time of the ward boundary review that reported in 2021, because it was the site of large-scale housing development, particularly around the new Barking Riverside station.
The Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE) essentially split the ward into two – a three-member ward called Barking Riverside and the two-member Thames View. The old Thames ward was not divided neatly between the established council-built estate and newly developed areas. However, the Barking & Dagenham Labour Group persuaded the commission that the communities were interdependent and that it was therefore reasonable to mix the two types of residential area within each new ward.
Thames View is a predominantly working-class ward with areas of deprivation. It has, for London, low levels of professional and managerial workers (20 per cent compared to London’s 38 per cent) and people with degrees, and more working in routine occupations. It has a high proportion who are long-term unemployed or have never worked (16.3 per cent, compared to 10.3 per cent in London).
Social landlords house 44.5 per cent of its households and comparatively few own their housing outright or rent privately. It is ethnically mixed – 36 per cent white, 29 per cent black and 26 per cent Asian. It is also a religious ward by London’s – quite religious – standards, with above-average proportions both of Christians (44 per cent) and Muslims (30 per cent).
The by-election was caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Fatuma Nalule, who had first been elected for Thames in a May 2021 by-election and was re-elected as a Thames View councillor in the full borough elections the following year. Four candidates contested the seat, with the Liberal Democrats sitting this one out.
Lucy Lee, defending for Labour, is a long-standing local resident who has been a community worker for Thames Life and Barking Riverside Limited.
The Conservative candidate Andrew Boff is a familiar face in London politics. He was first elected a councillor in Hillingdon in 1982, led that council from 1990 to 1992, and has been a London Assembly Member since 2008, leading the Conservative group from 2012 to 2015. He is an interesting figure, in that he is basically a Thatcherite right-winger, but his liberal social views and his genuine love of London in all its diversity make him seem further to the Left.
Were the Tories to try to win over London rather than demonising it for the sake of votes elsewhere, they could do worse than make Boff their London figurehead. He also has a track record of doing well in borough by-elections in unpromising areas. For example, he won a seat in Queensbridge ward in Hackney in 2005 and achieved a 25 per cent swing in his favour in Thames ward when he fought it in 2021. He fought Thames View, less successfully, as the sole Conservative candidate in 2022.
Paul Powlesland, the Green candidate, is a barrister and founder of Lawyers for Nature. Summoned for jury service at Snaresbrook Crown Court a year ago, he asked to swear his oath with reference to a vial of water from the River Roding, which he held to be sacred and “effectively my God”. The Roding flows into Barking Creek, which forms the western boundary of Thames View ward where it meets Newham.
Lewis Holmes, the Reform UK candidate, was active on social media until deleting his X (formerly Twitter) account just before the election and after it was alleged that he had called Barking a “nasty disgusting place”. He has disseminated far-Right content including praise for “Tommy Robinson” and Rupert Lowe MP, which is the sort of thing Reform’s much-vaunted vetting process should be picking up.
Turnout in the by-election was 23.9 per cent, a low proportion but not much down on the 28.4 per cent of 2022. Lee (pictured, centre) held the seat for Labour with 334 votes, representing 36.1 per cent of the total and a severe drop since 2022, when Labour’s two candidates polled over 60 per cent in the ward.
It is only in safe wards that Labour can afford to shed so much support and still hold on, but fortunately for the party they have a lot of safe wards in London. Barking & Dagenham council consists of 50 Labour councillors (including Lee), plus an opposition of just one, an Independent who was elected as Labour in May 2022 but left the party group the following December.
Second place went to Powlesland with 277 votes, a highly creditable 29.9 per cent share for the Greens, who did not even contest Thames View in 2022. Their campaign was fought on the usual local issues – housing, street cleaning and crime, plus opposition to the borough pension fund investing in fossil fuels and businesses with links to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Late in the race they made the classic tactical argument that its outcome was between them and Labour. Holmes of Reform UK came third, with 197 votes (21.3 per cent) and Boff finished fourth with 117 votes (12.6 per cent).
We have noted the steep fall in the Labour vote, which is not unusual in by-elections for the party of national government. It is also significant that Boff, a local resident, having a bad by-election result is the latest sign of the poor shape of the Conservative brand in London. The Tory vote share has been down in 13 of the 21 London by-elections held in 2025 so far. This should be a source of alarm, given that the 2022 baseline reflects their worst ever set of borough elections.
Whatever they are doing, both nationally and across London, it isn’t working. For Reform on the other hand it was a moderately encouraging result, despite their campaign mishaps. The party secured its third best percentage share in any London by-election (after Bromley Common & Holwood and Brentford East). That is the more striking in view of the ward’s multi-ethnic composition, though, it should also be noted that Reform’s vote share is not much higher than the British National Party (BNP) managed in the old Thames ward in 2010 (17.9 per cent, on a 61 per cent turnout).
The Greens can take considerable satisfaction from the Thames View result. They demonstrated their ability to win votes from a mostly working-class local electorate, as opposed to the white liberal middle-class demographic traditionally seen as the Green core.
The party seems to have a knack for communicating with newly-formed communities, such as those of the Stratford, Olympic Park ward in Newham, where they picked up two councillors in 2022. They could grow stronger in Thames View and next-door Barking Riverside. There are not many new areas of this type, but it is an interesting feature of politics that voters in places who have seen great change are open to a left-environmental appeal.
Photo from Barking & Dagenham Labour X/Twitter feed. Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky.
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