#7 Local elections: Three reflections on what they mean?

A policy wonk’s guide to understanding the local election results.

There will be lots of analysis about the election results. Much of that will focus on what it means for the Labour administration and its leader, Keir Starmer. I have nothing to add to that debate here. But I do have three short reflections about what the local election results mean for public services.

The emerging picture is that local authorities — much like the UK Government — are increasingly ungovernable. Reform’s success was a seismic change, with 14 new councils, but 23 authorities went No Overall Control. The story is one of fragmentation as much as Reform’s meteoric rise. Officers will find themselves increasingly at the centre of political differences. Indecision or worse, volatility, will blight some authorities. In other places, there is room for optimism. There are four authorities subject to a Best Value Notice. One of them changed leadership: Newham. The new Mayor — who represents Labour, as his predecessor did — now has an opportunity to turn things around.

Here are three reflections on the results.

1. The return of NOC

Authorities in No Overall Control are nothing new, but on first reading this local election has generated many. That’s to be expected: Labour was defending the most authorities, and they are performing poorly in the polls. But their defeats were not enough to flip authorities completely.

This is likely to create some unusual results. For example, the Greens are now in discussion with the Conservatives in Enfield about forming a coalition. Both share a dislike for the proposed New Town in Crews Hill, which is problematic for the Government’s New Towns programme.

Meanwhile in East Sussex, Reform has 22 councillors; the Liberal Democrats 13; Greens 11; Conservative 3 and one Independent. And in Basildon there are 12 Labour councillors; 12 Conservatives and 11 Reform councillors. Gavin Callaghan, the Leader of Basildon, has said that Labour will not seek to form an administration. Will the Conservatives work well with Reform, which is likely to win seats off of them in 12 months?

More local authorities are going to be entering coalitions. They will require more negotiation, and others will witness greater volatility. As Enfield demonstrates, it might only be a single issue that binds two political partners.

2. A psychological shock

Many of the local authorities that lost have undergone seismic change. They are not all authorities that are marginal or have a recent history of changing hands. Barnsley, a totemic Labour authority led by Sir Stephen Houghton, is one example. But there are many others.

This poses challenges for officials: modern local government leadership has become managerial rather than political, but fragmentation now requires political dexterity again.

Officials will need to get used to new ways of working. Informal and uncodified working arrangements between elected councillors and officials may need to be replaced with more codified and formal working arrangements. The relationships built over time with parties now in Opposition will need to be forged anew with new political leaders. Officials are used to this in some authorities, but not in others.

Many senior officials are also not well equipped to navigate political change. Many senior leaders privately agree.

In too many cases, senior officials are not politically savvy enough. The previous generation of Chief Executive had to navigate the Rates Act introduced under Margaret Thatcher in 1983 or withstand the militancy of Labour-run authorities in England throughout the 1980s. Before that there were far more independent councillors, which presented its own challenges. Many senior officials now cut their teeth on the Interim Market, affording them the ability to jump ship when the going gets tough. The net effect is that this generation of senior officials has less experience of navigating politics adeptly than their predecessors.

Outside of the political element of the role, leading has, to be clear, got much more difficult in many ways. Navigating sustained and acute financial challenges is more and more difficult. The rise in subsidiaries and borrowing has made governing ever more financially complex. Social media has added more scrutiny on decisions in the Town Hall (though the loss of local media has done the opposite). The list goes on.

3. But, there is room for optimism

There is, however, room for optimism. For too long, local government has operated within what I described in Renewal Journal as an “austerity of the imagination”. Political debate in many authorities has become managerial rather than transformational: who can manage decline more competently, rather than who can rethink how public services are delivered altogether.

Fragmentation may disrupt that consensus. The challenge is whether Reform or the Greens can translate that into governance. It is one thing to campaign against the status quo; it is another to run statutory services, balance budgets and make trade-offs under intense financial pressure. The practical realities of local government have a habit of moderating ideological certainty.

That tension will become increasingly visible over the next 12 months. Will Reform govern as fiscal insurgents, or as custodians of the same constrained system they criticised from the outside? Can the Greens develop a model of local government that extends beyond opposition to development and symbolic politics into a coherent programme for public service reform?

In practice, governing rewards pragmatism over purity, but a greater willingness to challenge orthodoxies that have calcified over the past decade is a healthy feature of local democracy.

The question is not whether Reform or the Greens will govern well. There is reason to believe in many cases they will struggle. The question is whether a more fragmented political landscape might force local government to rediscover a capacity for political imagination that it has, in many places, lost.