With counting almost over in this year’s local and mayoral elections, here is a summary of the key results and trends to emerge from an eventful 24 hours in UK politics.
– Local elections
A few councils have yet to finish declaring results, but two big trends in this year’s local elections are already clear: substantial gains for Reform in most areas of England that went to the polls and a widespread collapse in the Conservative vote.
The stand-out statistic is the number of councils where Reform now has a majority: eight of the 23 in which elections took place.
Six of these were gained directly from the Conservatives (Derbyshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire), while one was gained from Labour (Doncaster) and one from no overall control (Durham).
Reform did not control any councils in England before these elections.
Moreover, on three of the councils where Reform now has a majority, Derbyshire, Doncaster and Staffordshire, the party did not have a single councillor before polling day.
In a further three councils Reform are now the largest party, though short of a majority: Leicestershire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, all of which were previously run by the Tories with majority control.
Reform’s advance has not been consistent in every area that held elections on Thursday, however.
In Cambridgeshire the party won just 10 of the 61 seats up for grabs, while in Oxfordshire it managed to win only one seat.
The Liberal Democrats were the big winners in both of these councils, picking up enough seats to take full majority control.
The Lib Dems have also won a majority in Shropshire and are now the largest party in Devon, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire and Wiltshire.
By contrast, the Conservatives have lost their majority in every council they were defending.
There have been some very sharp drops in Tory support.
The number of Conservative councillors has fallen from 40 to seven in Devon; from 41 to nine in Warwickshire; from 46 to eight in Lancashire; from 54 to 14 in Lincolnshire; and from 56 to just five in Kent.
A snapshot of results after 20 of 23 councils have declared shows Reform on 593 seats, up 569 from before polling day; the Lib Dems on 336, up 132; the Conservatives on 241, down 499; Labour on 81, down 173; the Greens on 69, up 35; and independent candidates on 73, down 80.
Labour might have expected to emerge from the elections with a net gain in councillors, given that many of the contests took place in areas of the country where the party performed well at the 2024 general election.
Instead Labour has recorded a net loss in council seats and has also lost control of the only council it was defending at this set of elections, Doncaster, where the party’s councillors fell from 41 to 12 – a drop of 29.
Defeat here, along with the loss of the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by just six votes, suggests Sir Keir Starmer’s party is just as much at risk from Reform as the Conservatives – though there was some positive news for Labour in this year’s mayoral contests.
– Mayoral elections
Four regional mayors and two local mayors were up for grabs on May 1, and the results in all six contests reflect the increasingly fragmented and multi-party nature of politics in England.
Labour won three of the elections, but in each case the winner polled fewer than a third of the total votes cast.
Ros Jones came first in Doncaster with 32.6% of the vote, securing a fourth consecutive term in office; Karen Clark won in North Tyneside on 30.2% of the vote; and Helen Godwin topped the poll in the West of England with just 25.0% of the vote.
In all three contests Reform came a close second, with 31.7% of the vote in Doncaster, 29.4% in North Tyneside and 22.1% in the West of England.
The West of England result was particularly remarkable for a five-way split in the vote: Labour got 25.0%, Reform 22.1%, the Greens 20.0%, the Conservatives 16.6% and the Lib Dems 14.0%, meaning the main candidates all finished within a range of just 11 percentage points.
All this year’s mayoral elections were held using the first-past-the-post system – the same as parliamentary elections – which is different from the previous contests in 2021, when voters could express a first and second preference.
This means the results of this year’s elections are not directly comparable with those from four years ago.
There was another close contest in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, where Tory candidate Paul Bristow gained the mayoral post from Labour with 28.4% of the vote, ahead of a tight battle for second place between Reform (23.4%), Labour (20.1%) and the Lib Dems (19.6%).
The result means the Tories emerge from this year’s elections with at least one success to their name.
Two brand new mayoral positions were up for grabs this year and Reform won them both, taking Greater Lincolnshire on 42.0% of the vote and Hull and East Yorkshire on 35.8%, higher percentages than those achieved by the winners of the other contests.
Reform enjoyed a comfortable victory in Greater Lincolnshire, with candidate Dame Andrea Jenkyns, an ex-Tory MP, finishing well ahead of her former party the Conservatives (26.1%) and also Labour (12.3%).
Former boxer and Olympic medallist Luke Campbell clinched the Hull and East Yorkshire contest with 35.8% of the vote, with the Lib Dems making a strong showing in second place on 27.7% and the Conservatives third on 15.8%.
There was one feature common to all six of this year’s mayoral elections: very poor turnout, which ranged from 33.6% in North Tyneside to 29.8% in Hull and East Yorkshire.
Despite all the efforts of party supporters, plus all the noise and spectacle of these mayoral contests, about two-thirds of those eligible to vote chose not to do so.