What to look out for in London’s local elections
With more parties and more candidates than ever before, next week’s local elections across London are the most unpredictable for a generation, argues James Ford
On 7 May, Londoners go to the polls to elect the councillors that will run the capital’s 32 borough councils. More than 1,800 council seats are up for election, alongside five directly-elected executive mayors (for Croydon, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Lewisham and Newham), providing the biggest snapshot of political opinion in the capital before both the next general election and the next city hall election.
But this year’s contest is the most difficult to predict in recent London history. More parties are fighting this election than before and the polls have radically transformed the prospects of many previously marginal contenders into serious players.
All eyes will likely be on the Greens. The party is expected to do well in Inner London, eating into Labour support in boroughs like Hackney (where they may well take control), Lambeth, Lewisham, Haringey and Newham. Election watchers will want to pay particular attention to Camden, whose MPs include Keir Starmer himself, to see if there is a real prospect that the PM might lose his seat to the Greens at the next election.
Electoral fireworks
Although electoral fireworks and surprises are most likely to come from the Greens, Reform UK will be worth following in this election too. They will be looking for their best results to come from elsewhere in the UK but London may provide some interesting surprises. The capital has never been seen as fertile ground for Reform’s pitch (based as it is on Brexit, migrant scepticism and flag-waving) but the party has been gaining ground in the counties around London and is likely to take an electoral bite out of the ‘donut’ in outer east London. Boroughs to watch include Havering, Barking and Dagenham, Bexley and Bromley. Moreover, it will be interesting to see if they are able to make gains not just at Conservative expense but from Labour too.
In 2022 Labour made historic gains in the capital, winning 1,156 seats and controlling 21 boroughs, including taking control of flagship Tory authorities like Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet for the first time. The political situation is rather different four years later. Labour are tanking in the polls and are expected to do very, very badly, including in the capital. A poll for the London School of Economics (LSE) this week has projected that Labour could lose control of seven of those 21 boroughs that they currently hold. A really bad night for Labour would be defined by the party sustaining big losses of seats in some of those boroughs where the party has previously enjoyed single party status, such as Newham or Greenwich. The party may well remain the largest party in the capital, but it is likely they will lose vote share in multiple directions. This will scare Labour strategists at party HQ, and make the team around Sadiq Khan nervous about the Mayor’s prospects in 2028.
It will be difficult for Conservative spinners to claim the party is enjoying any kind of revival if it is still losing control of once rock-solid boroughs like Bromley or Bexley to Reform UK but only regaining control of boroughs it never should have lost in the first place
Although 2022 was a historic low for Conservative prospects in London, there is little evidence that the Official Opposition’s fortunes have been dramatically transformed in the intervening four years. The Conservatives have talked up their chances of taking back Westminster and Wandsworth – and are likely to act as though doing so is a great success – but it looks likely that the party will lose seats overall, especially in outer London. It will be difficult for Conservative spinners to claim the party is enjoying any kind of revival if it is still losing control of once rock-solid boroughs like Bromley or Bexley to Reform UK but only regaining control of boroughs it never should have lost in the first place.
The Lib Dems may not be getting much airtime in this election, but they are still set for modest gains. In addition to holding the three boroughs in southwest London (Richmond, Kingston and Sutton) where the party has done well historically, they could be set to gain Merton from Labour and could gain seats in other inner London areas such as Southwark.
Because there are so many parties fighting it out in London in these elections, there is a significant chance that the political picture in each local authority could get quite messy. That LSE poll projected that as many as one in three boroughs could end up in ‘no overall control’ (compared to just two – Croydon and Havering – currently). That may mean that minority administrations try to exercise control, or local coalitions could be formed between unlikely political bedfellows. In such boroughs, the fireworks might only just be starting!
James Ford was an advisor to Mayor of London Boris Johnson