UK local elections 2025: How to watch like a pro

LONDON — Polls are open in the first big set of elections since British Prime Minister Keir Starmer led Labour to last summer’s landslide.

Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch’s gloomy aides anticipate losing hundreds of councillors and control of county halls in Tory shires. Labour is defending some tricky mayoralties and its first Westminster by-election.

But the thread uniting them (and perhaps the biggest story) is Reform UK.

Leading the opinion polls, Nigel Farage has the highest expectations on him of any leader by far — and these results will either puff up or puncture the right-wing populist’s much-hyped ambition to be U.K. prime minister in 2029. The centrist Liberal Democrats and the left-wing Greens are looking to benefit too.

Grab a strong coffee — here’s POLITICO’s essential guide to the day ahead.

So what’s actually in play today?

1,641 seats across 14 county councils … eight unitary authorities … and one metropolitan district. Then there are five regional mayoralties … one city mayoralty … and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, over a seat in the House of Commons.

This round of the electoral cycle was never set to be the most bumper, and it’s been slimmed down further by delays to nine elections. That means Labour gets a pass in areas where the party would have had greater expectations to win. All this is only happening in England, too — the Scottish and Welsh parliament elections (and the chaos they’ll bring) are another year away.

Tory spinners won’t let anyone forget that these seats were last fought in 2021 — the height of the Tory government’s Covid vaccine bounce under Boris Johnson. Labour got such a drubbing that Starmer considered quitting as party leader. The hefty defeat of that night will go some way in masking the now-prime minister’s unpopularity today.

Only one of the councils up today is run by Labour, while 14 are held by the Tories — who are defending in the realms of 1,000 seats. Labour is defending about 300, the Lib Dems 220-ish and Reform (not on the playing field last time) just a handful due to defections. Hence Labour is doing its utmost to foreshadow this as a Tory-Reform “dogfight.”

How’s the Runcorn by-election looking?

Labour has been putting up a decent fight to retain its House of Commons seat in Runcorn and Helsby. But Farage’s Reform has done little to douse expectations that it will deliver an upset.

Labour is struggling in the national polls while still in its difficult first year in power, and this is a by-election triggered by the previous Labour MP, Mike Amesbury, literally punching a constituent and having to stand down. But at last year’s general election it was Labour’s 49th safest seat.

Defeat here will leave many of Starmer’s MPs worrying about their future.

What about the mayoralties up for grabs?

Labour controls four of the six mayoralties up for grabs, while the other two are new creations. Farage’s big hope is that former Tory MP (and Johnson diehard) Andrea Jenkyns makes good of heavy expectations to clinch Greater Lincolnshire for Reform in primo Brexit-supporting territory.

Labour’s long control of Doncaster is looking dicey. Then there’s the West of England, scandal-hit for Labour, where Farage pal Aaron Banks hopes to win. But the Greens are vying to squeeze Labour from the left and win here too.

The results of the by-election and four of the six mayoralities are all expected to be declared overnight — so if it’s a good night for Reform, it will be Labour officials waking up/powering through to the bulk of the bad news on Friday. Only on Friday afternoon will we start to see the bulk of either the Tory bloodletting, or Lib Dem triumphs.

How about the county halls?

Publicly Badenoch has been managing expectations into the ground — but privately Conservative officials are approaching seven feet under when it comes to the council seats in play.

Advisers argue the Tories could shed 700 seats (500 of them to Reform, the bulk of the rest to the Lib Dems) and lose the 14 councils they control. “It wouldn’t be unrealistic to say we could lose all of them,” one official told POLITICO London Playbook. That level of catastrophizing would seem unlikely, considering how true blue these heartlands are. 

But it’s a scenario even rivals aren’t ruling out as a possibility. Expect alarming questions for Conservative HQ if hundreds of councillors are blown out of town.

If winning back Hartlepool and other so-called Red Wall seats last July buoyed Labour hopes that its old heartlands may not be lost for good … then a warning may be on the way. In sunnier times the party would hold onto the single council it controls, Doncaster, and would take back the majority in Durham it held for a century until 2021. But any trace of Labour optimism has dampened as Farage’s has grown.

Okay now give me the sell on why this matters

As pollster Ipsos has pointed out, this could be the first time overall vote share for the two main parties slips below 50 percent in the local elections. Voters’ dissatisfaction at their long-term rulers and the rise of smaller alternatives could be further proof Britain is entering a world of multi-party politics that the first-past-the-post electoral system can’t easily handle.

Of course, local councils and metro mayors hold vital powers in their own right to deliver social care, transport and education. Bins are pretty important and the very essence of governance in action.

But the real reason Westminster is tuning in with such vigor is to see whether Farage can credibly claim he’ll overtake the Tories as the main party on the right — and the results will intensify speculation in the years to come about pacts, deals or dalliances with the Conservatives.

It’s not hard to find Labour insiders talking up how Reform taking control of some councils wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the government — considering Farage’s lot would actually be on the coalface of running somewhere. If any councils do go teal, their every move will be scrutinized from outside. Prepare for those attack stories.

Even in the event of the unreasonable worst case scenario for the Conservatives, no one really expects Badenoch to be toppled just yet. Tory apparatchiks reckon that’s more likely after the bigger tranche of elections coming next May — but you can be sure the results from today will be key in not only setting the narrative in Westminster, but morale among the (remaining) troops.

Weeks of closer dissection of the results will ensue. Ward-by-ward vote shares will be pored over to work out what really happened, where. The Labour left will inevitably argue the party is losing votes by tacking right, yet still Reform is triumphing … while yet more Tories will pop up speaking about the inevitably of doing some sort of deal with Farage.

Get used to this. It’ll carry on, on-and-off, until the next general election due in 2029.

Fine, I’m sold, now give me the timings

Our hour-by-hour guide is approximate. Thanks to the Local Government Information Unit’s research, PA’s comprehensive run-down of declarations and to POLITICO London Playbook’s campaign-weary contacts.

Friday, 2 a.m.: Defeat for Labour in North Tyneside (red since 2013) would get Starmer’s side off to a particularly bad start, considering both its main Westminster seats are heartlands the party won last year by a landslide. The messy nature of Britain’s new multi-party politics will be on full display in the race to be the West of England’s next mayor. It’s here the Greens reckon they have their best chance of grabbing an office from the left. 

3 a.m.: Labour carried Runcorn and Helsby by 14,696 votes at the general election — making it as safe on paper as Hackney South and Shoreditch. But Reform UK now fancies its chances at landing a blow (ahem…) on Labour. This Westminster by-election is sure to dominate early headlines.

4 a.m.: Barring unforeseen circumstances, we should’ve learned by now whether Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns will get the chance to establish her own little Elon Musk-style DOGE in the east of England by becoming the mayor of Greater Lincolnshire. 

5 a.m.: Reform winning the Doncaster mayoralty would be another upset for Labour — and wouldn’t make for comfortable reading for Ed Miliband, as the energy secretary’s seat is in the city’s north. Labour has typically held this office since its inception in 2002 (apart from a four-year interlude by the fringe right-wing English Democrats). Reform’s 30-year-old candidate is eying his chances, battling Tory ex-MP Nick Fletcher for the right-wing vote. Labour activists concede it’ll be “tight.”

7 a.m.: The first county hall result will be Northumberland, the only council being counted overnight. Labour won all four MPs here at the last election, and would expect to win control from a Tory minority administration if the party were to repeat its success of the Blair era. But Reform performed strongly too and will hope to capitalize on national dissatisfaction. 

Consider getting some kip: The spin war on the airwaves will now dominate — as there’ll be a lull in results while the counters in the remaining contests get fired up.

1 p.m.: Durham is proper Labour heartland territory. Until 2021, the party had controlled the county for a century. After mopping up every seat here in the general election, this was seen as Labour’s best chance of regaining control of a council. But Farage has been campaigning hard here personally and hopes to make real inroads. The Conservatives are likely to lose their slender majority in Lancashire in the coming hour.

2.30 p.m.: Hull and East Yorkshire is a new mayoralty where four parties are vying for the title — Lib Dems, Labour, Tories and Reform’s Luke Campbell, who was ahead of the pack in YouGov’s poll. The 37-year-old Olympic boxing gold medalist could be one to watch.

3 p.m.: Council candidates in Labour-held Doncaster will start to hear their fate before the really tricky times begin for the Tories.Buckinghamshire is about as blue as it gets, so if that slips into no overall control then the grimmest of Tory predictions could come true. A slim silver lining for the Tories could come if former MP Paul Bristow takes the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoralty from Labour.

4 p.m.: The Lib Dems reckon on a good night they could take control of Shropshire, but they’ll also be looking for gains in Gloucestershire and to do well in Oxfordshire. It’s from this point that losses from numerous Tory-held councils could start picking up.

5 p.m.: Reform will hope to do particularly well on Lincolnshire council — one of the most Brexit-backing counties, and home to the Commons seat of deputy leader Richard Tice. 

6 p.m.: Cornwall, Wiltshire, Cambridgeshire and Devon are top places where the Lib Dems hope to make gains in what could be a golden hour for Ed Davey’s gang.

7 p.m.: Kent should be one of the final councils to declare. A loss of control in the once-true-blue Garden of England would be another humiliating result for Badenoch, considering the Tories’ currently have 49 councillors more than the second-placed Lib Dems.

This guide originally appeared in POLITICO London Playbook.