The election results for English council elections are still coming out, but we wanted to share with you a different perspective to the one you will see in the media.
The media report ‘the English council election results’ and give you all the statistics for those elections. But there are 317 councils in England, and only 136 (43%) had elections today. And, of those councils which did have elections, most of them only elected a third or half of their councillor seats. So, the English council election results do not tell the whole picture. In fact, these election results tell a very partial picture, because more than half of councils did not even have an election and few elected their whole council.
We have made an initial calculation of how many Councillor seats each party holds across England, in all councils, taking into account election results declared up to 8 pm on Friday 8 May. These are only approximate totals, but we think they are helpful.
As you can see, based on results so far, the 3 established parties – Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem – hold between them over three-quarters of all council seats (77%). The two newer parties, Greens and Reform, only hold 14% of seats. For all the talk of ‘huge gains’ for newer parties, especially Reform, in this election, the reality is that these remain small parties across England. The larger parties still hold the vast majority of seats on English councils.
BuDS is not a party-political organisation and, as a registered charity, we are careful to be scrupulously party-politically neutral. However, we want disabled people to have accurate and unbiased information about all subjects, including elections, and this is why we have produced this brief update.