Local Elections 2025: The Preview

Tory cataclysm edition

At least Ed Davey is enjoying himself on the campaign trail

Update Sunday 26^th April:

I published this a little earlier than local elections prediction posts in previous years, so I’m doing a weekend update to take into account a raft of mayoral polling published in the last few days from YouGov and More in Common. It hasn’t led me to change any of my predictions but some of the races are looking a little different to what I expected so I’ve rewritten some of the narrative and added in the polling data.

I have made a couple of changes to council predictions. Specifically, following feedback from Lib Dem subscribers, I’m saying they’ll win Shropshire and Oxfordshire outright but Cambridgeshire will stay in no overall control. In my experience Lib Dems are pretty good at knowing where they’ll do well!

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It’s that time of year when I apologise to our international subscribers and dive into the details of England’s local elections, including predictions for every single council and mayoralty in play.

The topline narrative is not difficult to foresee. The main parties will struggle, particularly the Tories because they were at their high point when these contests were last fought back in 2021. Reform will do well, gaining – at minimum – numerous councillors and potentially a whole lot more. The Lib Dems will also continue to take chunks of the Conservatives’ prosperous heartlands. Independents and Greens will likely add to their haul too.

The fragmentation of British politics, which we’ve been writing about on this site for a while, will continue. This will put more pressure on the main party leaders as they struggle to find strategies to hold increasingly small and fragile voter coalitions together. A general election is a long way off, but it will all add to the growing sense of panic in Westminster.

At the level of individual contests, though, this round of elections is fiendishly difficult to predict. This is largely because Reform barely competed last time but are now polling at the same level as Labour and ahead of the Tories, turning large numbers of seats into extremely close three-way marginals.

There are other factors making it trickier too. In the last few years there’s been a powerful “anti-Tory” tactical voting coalition desperate to punish a deeply unpopular government. That’s helped Labour a lot in their target seats despite relatively low vote shares. How much will that hold now they’re the unpopular government? Plus the four regional mayoralties up for grabs this year are being elected under first past the post, which in a multi-party system makes them exceptionally hard to read. (As you will see, Labour’s refusal to shift back to electing mayors via the supplementary vote method, as was previously the case, is unfathomable as it hurts them a lot.)

But I’ve given it a go anyway, as trying to figure out who’ll win is a good way to explain the relevant variables. In the rest of the post I’ll go through every contest being fought on the 1^st May, highlighting the results to look out for, what I think will happen, and how they’ll shift the narrative.