A former nursery manager has been elected as Nuneaton’s first female MP.

Labour MP Jodie Gosling took the seat with 15,216 votes, overturning the majority of incumbent Conservative MP Marcus Jones, who polled 11,737 votes.

Gosling is a director of Jelly Beans Nurture Nursery, a community setting which she opened in 2015 after the local Sure Start children’s centre closed.     

The now Prime Minister Keir Starmer chose Nuneaton to announce his party’s childcare policy last month. Visiting the town’s Nursery Hill Primary School, he said a Labour government would create 100,000 additional childcare places and more than 3,000 new nurseries.

Labour pledged to turn classrooms in existing primary schools into “school-based nurseries”, taking advantage of falling nursery and primary school pupil numbers over the next five years. It has said these settings, which will be funded by VAT levied on private schools, could be run by local private and voluntary sector nursery providers or the schools themselves.