On 1 May 2025, local elections will be held to elect 1,641 councillors across 24 local authorities, and six mayors. Elections in seven county councils and two unitary authorities have been delayed owing to the Government’s programme of local government reorganisation.
Elections will be held for all councillors in the following local authorities:
County Councils
- Cambridgeshire County Council
- Derbyshire County Council
- Devon County Council
- Gloucestershire County Council
- Hertfordshire County Council
- Kent County Council
- Lancashire County Council
- Leicestershire County Council
- Lincolnshire County Council
- Nottinghamshire County Council
- Oxfordshire County Council
- Staffordshire County Council
- Warwickshire County Council
- Worcestershire County Council
Unitary Authorities
- Buckinghamshire Council
- Cornwall Council
- Durham County Council
- North Northamptonshire Council
- Northumberland County Council
- Shropshire Council
- West Northamptonshire Council
- Wiltshire Council
Metropolitan Borough Council
- City of Doncaster Council
The following combined authority mayors will be elected:
- Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
- Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire
- Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire
- Mayor of the West of England
The following metropolitan borough mayors will be elected:
- Mayor of Doncaster
- Mayor of North Tyneside
Who will win the local elections?
Most of the council seats that are up for election in May were last elected in 2021. This was the height of the Conservatives’ popularity, with Boris Johnson’s Government riding high on a wave of popular support following the broadly successful vaccine rollout.[1] In the last four years, the Conservative Party has plummeted in the polls.
Kemi Badenoch has failed to regain much ground in the polls following the General Election last year, and Reform has now eclipsed the Conservative Party as the most popular party to the right of centre.[2] Therefore, we can safely predict that the Conservatives will lose hundreds of council seats. Losses are expected to be particularly severe in the East of England, where Reform is strongest.
However, Labour is unlikely to benefit from the Conservatives’ decline. While most of these elections are not happening in Labour heartlands, such as London or large Northern cities, Labour has plunged in the polls since the General Election and will lose some council seats, bleeding votes to the Liberal Democrats, Reform and the Green Party.
Reform has surged in the polls since 2021 and will surely succeed in increasing its share of the vote, and number of council seats. However, they have a low starting point, with no councillors elected in 2021, are struggling with internal divisions and have to build up local branches, with associated voter information, fundraising apparatus and canvassers, from scratch. If Reform could take control of a local authority, that would mark a major milestone in the rise from fringe party to serious political force.
Can we predict the outcome?
Overall trends are easy to foresee. For instance, the Conservatives will lose councillors across the country, the Liberal Democrats will win seats in the London commuter belt, and Reform will perform well in the east of the country.
Only one poll has been conducted and published, an MRP poll by Electoral Calculus for the Daily Telegraph.[3] This poll predicts that the Conservatives will lose almost half the council seats they are defending, with Labour also losing dozens of seats and the Liberal Democrats and Reform benefiting the most from the two main parties’ losses.
However, the rise of Reform, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party has left the political landscape more fragmented and chaotic than ever. The Conservative and Labour combined share of the vote in General Election polls now stands at under 50 per cent, the lowest figure since 2019.[4] This means there are now four or five-way contests in some local authorities, or even in individual seats, making it very difficult to predict the outcomes. The West of England Mayoral Election is especially difficult to predict, with all of the five largest parties having a chance of winning the contest.
This dynamic also applies to local authorities as a whole. Electoral Calculus’s poll forecasts that the number of county councils and unitary authorities under no overall control will rise from 7 to 16, out of 23. This means that those who seek to have an understanding of the direction of a particular local authority will take may have to wait some time after the elections, as the makeup of the executive will depend on coalition agreements or informal agreements between different parties.
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[1] Politico, Poll of Polls United Kingdom, 22 April 2025, link
[2] Ibid
[3] Electoral Calculus, MRP Local Election Poll March 2025, 14 March 2025, link
[4] Politico, Poll of Polls United Kingdom, 22 April 2025, link
