What do voters think about the Batley and Spen by-election?
After a Liberal Democrat victory in Buckinghamshire, claiming a seat which had always voted Conservative, the spotlight now moves 175 miles up the M1 motorway to Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire on 1 July. A constituency of towns built on a 19th Century textile boom and rural areas rich with agriculture, Batley and Spen is surrounded - and arguably overshadowed - by the much larger urban areas of Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield and Huddersfield. It is a diverse constituency, with significant disparities in wealth. Almost 10,000 households claim Universal Credit. A fifth of the population is of Asian heritage, compared with the UK average of 7%. GCSE scores are slightly higher than the England average. A relative lack of railway stations in the area means that many rely on the bus to travel between its towns and villages. So, the BBC boarded the Arriva 271 service, which winds its way across the constituency over 40 stops and about eight miles (13km), to hear what people in Batley and Spen want their new MP to do for them.