Andy Burnham won more than half of all votes cast in the Makerfield by-election, comfortably beating the combined total for second and third place parties Reform UK and Restore Britain.
The now-former Greater Manchester mayor won 54.8% of the votes cast, outperforming all the opinion polls published during the campaign, none of which placed him above 50%.
Reform candidate Rob Kenyon won 34.5% of the vote, while Restore Britain’s Rebecca Shepherd won 6.8%, which together come to 41.3%.
Mr Burnham’s vote share was also higher than the figure achieved by his predecessor Josh Simons at the 2024 general election, which was 45.2%, and ranks as Labour’s best performance in the seat since 2017.
Mr Kenyon’s 34.5% of the vote represents Reform’s second best performance at a Westminster by-election to date, behind only the contest in Runcorn and Helsby in 2025, where his party got 38.7% – which was enough to win the seat from Labour.
Both Labour and Reform finished well ahead of all other parties in Makerfield.
Ms Shepherd was the only other candidate to get more than 5% of the votes cast – the threshold needed to avoid losing the £500 deposit that all candidates have to pay to stand for election to parliament in the UK.
The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Greens, along with eight other candidates, all got less than 5% of the vote and lost their deposit.
Conservative candidate Michael Winstanley finished in fourth place with just 2.2% of the vote.
This is the Tories’ second lowest share of the vote at a Westminster by-election since the Second World War.
The lowest occurred a few months ago at the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, when the Tories won only 1.9% of the vote.
Green party candidate Sarah Wakefield finished fifth with 0.7%, while Liberal Democrat candidate Jake Austin came sixth with 0.4% – the lowest for the Lib Dems at any by-election since the party was founded in 1988.
There was a swing in the share of the vote from Reform to Labour of 3.4 percentage points – the equivalent of more than three in 100 people who voted Reform at the 2024 general election switching to Labour this time.
Mr Burnham’s majority over Mr Kenyon was 9,231, nearly 4,000 more than Josh Simons’ majority in 2024 over Mr Kenyon of 5,399.
Mr Burnham also pushed up the size of Labour’s lead over Reform from 13 percentage points in 2024 to 20 points.
The turnout in Makerfield was 58.7%, the highest for a parliamentary by-election in nearly seven years.
The last time a by-election had a higher turnout was the contest in Brecon and Radnorshire in August 2019, which saw the Liberal Democrats win the seat from the Conservatives, when turnout was 59.6%.
The jump in turnout meant more votes were up for grabs, with Mr Burnham winning a total of 24,927, an increase on the 18,202 won by Mr Simons in 2024.
There were 15,696 votes cast for Reform, up 2.7% on the party’s performance in 2024; 3,111 for Restore (which did not stand in 2024); 997 for the Conservatives, down 8.7%, 308 for the Greens, down 3.7%; and 163 for the Liberal Democrats, down 6.4%.
The other candidates got a combined total of 274 votes.
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