What is really happening in Council by-elections

From both the mainstream media and sections of social media, you might get the misleading impression that Reform  UK are walking all over all the other parties in local council elections, 

The real picture is a bit more complicated that that.

Here, courtesy of Election Maps, are the aggregate result of the 212 Council By-Elections (for 217 Seats) Since the 2024 General Election:


LAB: 74 (-35)

CON: 57 (+22)

LDM: 41 (=)

RFM: 12 (+12)

IND: 11 (=)

GRN: 10 (+2)

SNP: 7 (-1)

PLC: 3 (=)

LOC: 2 (-2)

In a certain number of the seats they managed to contest, Reform UK did pull off 12 wins, all gains, mostly at Labour's expense. This is the sort of performance which usually indicates an insurgent party capable of pulling off the occasional shock win - not the performance of a party on the verge of gaining power.

Labour have been doing badly, losing 35 seats, though they did win more than any other party. That was because many of these by-elections were called in previously Labour-held council wards, with Labour defending just over half, 109 out of 217, of the seats up. Labour's performance has been bad rather than disastrous - it is unusual for a party which has just won a huge majority to lose so much support so quickly, but the fact that they held 74 seats suggest that the Labour government is not yet quite as unpopular as a lot of people, including me, think they deserve to be. 

The Conservatives have done fairly well, with a close second in seats won - and remember, that's when 109 of the seats being contested were previously Labour compared to only 35 previously Conservative ones - and the Conservatives made far more net gains than any other party, gaining the majority of the seats which changed hands.

That's a good enough performance to suggest that all the political obituaries being written for the Conservatives on the left and in pro-Reform parts of legacy and social media are very premature. There is everything to play for.

The Lib/Dems held the position of 41 seats with zero net gains - they won a few seats from Labour or the Conservatives but lost an equivalent number, mostly to the Conservatives. (Yes, I published a graphic last week showing the Lib/Dems with a net loss of one seat - they pulled one back in Pendle yesterday to come out even since the general election.) 

Veteran Lib/Dem councillor and Blogger Mark Pack will, of course, always try to put the best light on things from the perspective of his own party (for which I can hardly criticise him) but he is honest enough to have published a useful table showing among other things that the net traffic between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats since the May 2024 local elections has been a net gain of two council seats by the Conservatives from the Lib/Dems. Link just below:

 Council by-election results scorecard 2024-2025


Overall, here is a graphic from Election Maps showing how seats changed hands since GE2024.


 

Comments

Chris Whiteside said…
A minor Postscript, I cannot quite line up the numbers in the tweet from Election Maps (as quoted in the body of the piece above) with those in their graphic, though the difference is only one seat.

The discrepancy will probably be some silly thing like a difference over how to treat a defection by a councillor who then resigned..

The numbers in the tweet have the Conservatives up 22 seats to 57, which should mean we previously held 35, but the graphic has the Conservatives going from 34 seats to 57, which should mean a net gain of 23.

It isn't a huge difference so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. If you want to make an issue of the matter, take it up with Election Maps.
5:35 pm
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