Caroline Henry has been elected as Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner.
The Conservative candidate delivered the latest in a series of blows to Labour by beating Paddy Tipping, who had held the post since it was created in 2012. Liberal Democrat David Watts was third.
Mrs Henry was elected after winning 138,658 votes to Mr Tipping’s 131,302.
The vote across the city and county was held on Thursday (May 6) – alongside the Nottinghamshire County Council election, which saw the Conservatives win an overall majority and inflict heavy defeats on Labour.
Counting of the Police and Crime Commissioner votes, carried out at Rushcliffe arena, was held back until Saturday (May 8).
A Labour veteran and former Sherwood Labour MP, Mr Tipping had held the post since it was first created in a 2012 election – defending successfully in 2016.
Results across the country meant a closer fight was expected in 2021. Local council elections had seen several shocks for Labour and on Friday night Labour lost Derbyshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner post to Conservative Angelique Foster.
While commissioners can stand as political party candidates, they do not control the force operationally day-to-day.
This is left up the Chief Constable. Commissioners are tasked with deciding how budgets should be spent, ensuring police forces hit crime targets, setting local policing priorities, and scrutinising how their local force performs overall.
Police and Crime Commissioner elections are run on a different system to council and parliamentary elections.
The commissioner ballots use a supplementary voting system – where voters can choose a first preference candidate and a second preference candidate.
When the first preference votes have been counted, if no candidate has an overall majority (more than 50 per cent) the second preference votes for the top two candidates are then counted.
First preference and second preference votes for these two candidates are then added together. The candidate with the most total votes wins the election.
Although Mrs Henry was more than 10,000 votes ahead of Mr Tipping at the first preference counting stage, she fell short of the 50 per cent total required to declare victory.
Mr Watts was eliminated at this stage, and second preference vote counting began, which led to Mrs Henry’s overall victory with a total of 138,658 being declared shortly after 4pm.
The turnout for the vote was 34 per cent.
