Local and mayoral elections 2025: Key results and trends

With counting 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.

Two trends defined the results of the council elections: a widespread collapse in support for the Conservatives; and voters throwing their support behind a range of different parties, leading to substantial gains for Reform in most parts of England that went to the polls, plus success for the Liberal Democrats.

The stand-out statistic is the number of local authorities where Reform now has a majority: 10 of the 23 councils in which elections took place.

Eight of these were gained directly from the Conservatives (Derbyshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, North Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and West Northamptonshire), 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 four councils, Reform are now the largest party, though short of a majority: Cornwall, Leicestershire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, all of which were previously run by the Tories.

Reform’s advance has not been consistent in every area that held elections on Thursday, however.

In Buckinghamshire the party won just three of the 97 seats on the council, in Cambridgeshire it won 10 of the 61 up for grabs, while in Oxfordshire it managed to win only one seat.

The Liberal Democrats were the big winners in both Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire, 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 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.

The full result across all 23 councils shows Reform has won a total of 677 councillors, up 648 on its tally before polling day; the Conservatives have won 319, down 635; the Lib Dems have won 370, up 146; Labour has won 98, down 198; the Greens have 79, up 41; and independent candidates have 89, down 95.

Labour might have expected to emerge from these 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.

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, a former 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.