‘An exceptionally bad year across all measures’

Every year since 2011, I have written a preview of the local and devolved elections and a scorecard after the elections referring back to it. You can read my preview here.

This series of articles isn’t about politically analysing what happened or how we should respond, I will do that elsewhere. Here I just record the change in Labour’s local government standing against a range of measures, in the bad years as well as the good.

This was clearly an exceptionally bad year, across all the measures.

As I predicted in my preview article, Labour repeated the wipeout in Reform-facing areas in the North and Midlands that my own area of County Durham had experienced in the 2025 County Council elections. The scale of this was extraordinary, with very few Labour seats being held (for instance in my own region we are down to just 12 Labour councillors in Gateshead, 5 in Sunderland, 2 in Newcastle and 1 in South Tyneside, having previously led all four authorities). It was only mitigated by the fact that only one third of the council was up for election in some of the Metropolitan Boroughs.

In London and the South, the picture was more one of a conventionally very bad set of results, rather than an unprecedented one, as the Green surge proved smaller and more geographically focused than the Reform one. That focus did lead to the Greens seizing control of the London Boroughs of Hackney, Lewisham and Waltham Forest plus Hastings and Norwich. Some major cities like Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle experienced losses in both directions, to Reform and the Greens (and to Gaza Independents in Birmingham).

READ MORE: ‘Labour has lost hundreds of elected members – how we care for them now will define what comes next’

The slightly less dramatic Green surge than the Reform one, combined with very effective targeting of the last line of defensive seats by Labour’s HQ, helps explain why Labour’s seat losses were about 500 below the most pessimistic pre-election forecasts by academics and pollsters of 2,000 losses.

Whereas the authorities lost to Reform in the North have in some cases been Labour since time immemorial, those lost to the Greens or No Overall Control in inner London have had very big Labour majorities since the Lib Dems went into the Coalition government in 2010, but before that did have competitive Labour vs Lib Dem electoral environments and a history of control being lost in bad years in the 1990s and 2000s.

In fact, the awful London results were very slightly better than the 2006 low point under Tony Blair: control was maintained in 9 boroughs versus 7 in 2006 (and only 3 in 1968), and there are 11 more Labour councillors in London than in 2006. Labour retained 60% of its councillors in London, but only 26% outside London.

On the four main national indicators that I use: 

First, projected national vote share (PNS), the estimated figures the BBC uses are as follows:

2010: 29% (general election result)
2011: 37%
2012: 38%
2013: 29%
2014: 31%
2015: 30% (general election result)
2016: 31%
2017: 27%
2018: 35%
2019: 28%
2020: No election due to Covid
2021: 29%
2022: 35%
2023: 35%
2024: 34%
2025: 20%
2026: 17%

This is the lowest Labour score ever recorded in the series, 3% below the previous lows in 2009 and 2005. That doesn’t invalidate national opinion polls showing us slightly above 20%: national vote share in local elections for Labour has always been lower than the Westminster opinion polls, because the Greens, Lib Dems and Independents perform better in local than in general elections, when they get squeezed.

Raw number of Labour councillors is the national (Great Britain) total figure, including all the thousands of councillors not up for election:

2009: 4,414
2010: 4,831
2011: 5,691
2012: 6,559
2013: 6,850
2014: 7,098
2015: 6,895
2016: 6,859
2017: 6,297
2018: 6,468
2019: 6,323
2021: 5,656
2022: 5,904
2023: 6,415
2024: 6,600
2025: 6,395
2026: 4,377 (estimated)

This is an estimated figure as it is difficult to track with 100% accuracy the in-year changes before Thursday’s elections from byelections and defections. It looks like we have probably dipped just below the previous recorded low from 2009.

Number of gains or losses. These are the number of seats lost in years where Labour has incurred net council seat losses since 1997:

1998 – 88
1999 – 1,150
2000 – 574
2002 – 334
2003 – 833
2004 – 464
2005 – 114
2006 – 319
2007 – 665
2008 – 331
2009 – 291
2015 – 203
2016 – 18
2017 – 386
2019 – 84
2021 – 327
2025 – 187
2026 – 1,496

Unfortunately, this is another dismal record being broken.

Control of councils. The number of councils that Labour has controlled has been as follows:

2002 – 136
2003 – 103
2004 – 94
2005 – 92
2006 – 75
2007 – 58
2008 – 46
2009 – 37
2010 – 54
2011 – 81
2012 – 114
2013 – 117
2014 – 120
2015 – 114
2016 – 114
2017 – 107
2018 – 105
2019 – 99
2021 – 91
2022 – 96
2023 – 116
2024 – 121
2025 – 120
2026 – 78

This takes us back to just below 2011 levels, with scope for significant further losses next year as more Labour-controlled councils come up for election.

In the six mayoral contests, Labour held Newham due to a split anti-Labour vote, but lost Hackney and Lewisham to the Greens and narrowly failed to take Croydon from the Tories.

In the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s number of seats has been in continuous, steady decline, and this continued:

1999 – 56
2003 – 50
2007 – 46
2011 – 37
2016 – 24
2021 – 22
2026 – 17

However, Labour did find itself back in joint second place on seats (with Reform), having been third and a long way behind the Tories in 2016 and 2021.

The results for the Welsh Senedd were by far the worst on a night of very bad results, with only 9 seats won in an expanded chamber of 96 MSs.

Vote share in Wales fell off a cliff:

1999 – 38%
2003 – 40%
2007 – 32%
2011 – 42%
2016  – 35%
2021 – 40%
2026 – 11%

This wasn’t a pleasant article to have to write. I’d like to conclude that “Things can only get better!” but I’m not sure that is true!

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