A GENERAL Election is coming up – here is everything you need to know about the vote in the Furness area ahead of the polling date.

Residents will be asked to go to the polls on July 4 to select who they want to represent Barrow and Furness in Parliament.

Following the 2023 review of Westminster Constituencies, the Copeland constituency was abolished and the wards of Millom as well as Black Combe & Scafell will join the Barrow and Furness constituency area.

The MP for Barrow and Furness will represent towns and villages including Barrow, Dalton, Ulverston, Millom, Broughton, Askam and Kirkby in Parliament.

The candidates

Standing for the Conservative Party will be current MP Simon Fell who was first elected in 2019. Mr Fell is the anti-fraud champion and was also selected as the UK’s first-ever rural connectivity champion.

The Labour Party has selected the former mayor of Ulverston Michelle Scrogham as their parliamentary candidate. Ms Scrogham was selected as the Labour candidate in 2023 and was mayor of Ulverston between 2022 and May 2024.

For the Liberal Democrats, Adrian Waite will stand as their parliamentary candidate. He has lived in Cumbria since 1993 and is an accountant with seventeen years’ experience in local government.

The Green party has selected Lorraine Wrennall as their parliamentary candidate. Ms Wrennall pursued a career in health, particularly Public Health, with specialisms in health promotion, communications and tackling inequalities.

The 2019 results

In December 2019, current Conservative MP Simon Fell won 51.9 per cent of the vote share and was elected as MP for the area. Labour candidate Chris Altree came second with 18,087 votes which represented 39.3 per cent of the vote.

Lorraine Birchall, the Liberal Democrats candidate came third with 4.4 per cent of the vote and Chris Loynes from the Green Party received 1.5 per cent of the vote. Ged McGrath of the Brexit Party came fourth with 2.9 per cent of the vote. The turnout was 65.6 per cent.