Local Elections 2024: The Preview

With predictions for every race

Ben Houchen, Tory Mayor of Tees Valley, and Rishi Sunak pointing in different directions

It’s local election time again, and another opportunity to baffle our international readers, and most of our UK ones, with the endless complexities of English local government.

This year we have elections covering: 107 councils (metropolitan, unitary and district), the London mayor and assembly, nine combined authority mayors, one single authority mayor (Salford), 37 police commissioners in England and Wales, and the Westminster seat of Blackpool South, following the resignation of yet another disgraced Tory MP. Plenty to get stuck into.

As ever these contests are important in their own right. Though councils have been emasculated over the decades they are still responsible for critical services like social care and local transport. Mayors are growing in power and importance. Andy Burnham, in Manchester, has used his position to become the most popular politician in the country with higher national name recognition than Rachel Reeves or Ed Davey, something that others with ambition have noticed.

They are also important because they feed into the Westminster narrative. There is a widespread expectation the Conservatives will do very badly. So in order for these elections to have a real effect on that narrative they either need to be catastrophically bad for the Tories, or exceed low expectations. I’ll conclude by taking a look at how this is likely to play out, after going through each set of elections in turn.