Closing summary
The Guardian’s live coverage of the UK’s local elections is coming to an end for today. Below is a round-up of the key events as the counts have come in.
Keir Starmer is facing pressure to step down from some of his MPs after Labour suffered poor results in the elections, losing over 1,000 councillors in England and historic loses in the Welsh Senedd election. Asked if he would stand as prime minister at the next election, Starmer replied: “Yes. There’s a five-year term I was elected to do. I intend to see that through.”
Richard Burgon, who is on the left of the Labour party and was a Jeremy Corbyn loyalist under his tenure as Labour leader, released a statement saying that Labour’s local election results have “Keir Starmer’s name written all over it”. A number of other Labour MPs called for Keir Starmer to go, or to set out a timetable for his departure. However, Starmer’s cabinet have remained loyal to the PM so far.
Speaking from Chelmsford, Essex, Nigel Farage said the election results have reflected a “truly historic shift in voting patterns” in the UK after his Reform party won more than 1,000 councillors and won control of at least seven councils. “The results in the ‘red wall’ are truly astonishing,” Farage said, celebrating Reform’s gains from Labour in the Midlands, the North East and the North West. He also laid into the Conservatives, saying “no one would forgive them” for the decisions they took while in power.
The Green party also made gains in these elections, winning hundreds of council seats and the mayoral race in Hackney and Lewisham. “Today, we start the fightback,” said the new Hackney mayor, Zoë Garbett. “Across London and the country, people have made it clear that they are desperate for an alternative to this failing Labour government. It is not old parties versus new parties, this is about a system of fear versus a movement of hope.”
Plaid Cymru won 43 seats in Wales’s Senedd election, putting the Welsh nationalists in a comfortable position to form a minority government and ending more than 100 years of Labour hegemony. Eluned Morgan, Wales’s Labour first minister, lost her seat in the Senedd elections, the first major indicator of an expected near-wipeout for the party that has led Cymru since devolution began in 1999.
John Swinney, the Scottish National party leader, challenged Keir Starmer to show “greater respect” to the Scottish government after winning the Holyrood elections by a comfortable margin. The Scottish National party secured a record fifth term in office on Friday after securing at least 57 of Holyrood’s 129 seats, with Labour and Reform vying for a distant second place.
With 129 of 136 results already declared from English councils, we won’t have full results tonight – or even tomorrow.
The Birmingham City Council poll count was halted with just two of 101 seats left to declare.
Returning officer Rob Connelly confirmed that the count in the remaining ward would resume on Monday. The undeclared ward – Glebe Farm and Tile Cross – is understood to have gone to several recounts.
With two seats remaining to be decided, Reform had won 22 seats, Green Party 19, Labour 17, Conservatives 16, independents 13 and Lib Dems 12.
PA gives some further quotes from Wes Streeting, who declined to say he believed Keir Starmer was the right person to lead Labour into the next general election.
Asked whether he believed Starmer was the right person to do so, he told reporters in Redbridge: “Keir Starmer won a general election in 2024 that people thought was absolutely impossible after Labour’s crushing defeat in 2019.
“Now there’s no doubt that with the message that the voters have sent us across England, Wales and Scotland, that the Government bears a huge degree of responsibility for good Labour people losing, we have to take that on the chin, we have to respect the voters, and we have to show that Labour can still be the change that people are crying out for, the change that they voted for at the last general election, the change that they’ve demanded through this set of elections.”
Wes Streeting said Keir Starmer will “have my support” in setting out how the government will move forward.
The health secretary, who is widely viewed as a potential leadership contender, told reporters at the count for Redbridge Council: “Keir Starmer will be setting out how he will do that as our leader and prime minister.
“He will have my support in doing that, and I’ll continue putting my shoulder to the wheel as the health and social care secretary, who’s getting the NHS back on its feet and making sure it’s fit for the future.”
Keir Starmer is under pressure to set out a timeline for his departure after a crushing defeat in elections across Britain prompted senior Labour MPs to call for him to step down within a year, Pippa Crerar and Jessica Elgot write.
While the prime minister appeared to have avoided an immediate coup, there was a furious response to the results among senior MPs and the unions, with some warning him to change course or risk electoral oblivion. By Friday evening, 10 more MPs had called for him to set out a timetable for departure from No 10.
Louise Haigh, a former cabinet minister and co-chair of the powerful Tribune group of MPs, was the first to break cover. “What is abundantly clear is that unless the government delivers significant and urgent change, then the prime minister cannot lead us into another election,” she said.
One senior backbencher said: “We want Keir to agree a timetable for his departure, but we want it to be dignified. He should have his last conference this autumn and then oversee a leadership contest straight after. He can’t take us into next year’s locals. It’s too late.”
However, Starmer insisted that he “won’t walk away” from the leadership as doing so would “plunge the party into chaos”, although he acknowledged that voters were fed up with the slow pace of change.
Read the full report at the link below:
Reform UK’s Scottish leader has said his party is “behind the curve” north of the border, as he branded opponents “disrespectful” for not staying until the end of an election count.
Speaking in a nearly empty counting hall at the Braehead Arena in Renfrew, Malcolm Offord said he had been disappointed not to win the constituency in which he was running, PA reports.
Offord finished third in Inverclyde, though he was still elected on the regional list.
With almost all Scottish Parliament seats declared, Reform are vying with Scottish Labour for second place.
He said his political opponents were “disrespectful” for not staying at the count in Renfrew until the end, saying: “I think I’m here till the end because we recognise that voters all came to the polls … the least thing I could do was wait until the end, and I’m glad I’ve done that.”
Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay has said he always expected a “tough election”, on a day which has so far seen his party lose at least 12 seats, PA reports.
With 91 out of 129 Holyrood seats declared, the Scottish Conservatives have held on to four of the five constituencies they won at the last election in 2021.
One-time party leader Jackson Carlaw lost his Eastwood seat to the SNP’s Kirsten Oswald, and the party also lost five of its regional seats.
Speaking to journalists at a count at the Braehead Arena in Renfrew, Mr Findlay said votes for Reform had caused his party to lose to the SNP in a number of close-fought seats. “In many seats the Scottish Conservative candidates were beaten by the narrowest of margins, and that’s because people voted for Reform in those seats and let the SNP through the middle.”
Findlay is a candidate in the West of Scotland regional list, which is expected to be declared later on Friday.
Ed Miliband has joined the Labour cabinet MPs lining up to back Keir Starmer after Labour’s poor showing in the local elections.
“These are devastating election results for Labour and I’m deeply sorry for all of those colleagues who have lost their seats,” Miliband said in a post on X.
“Voters are making clear their anger at a broken economic and political status quo. As Keir has said, we must go further in delivering the mandate for change that Labour won in 2024 - and show how we will answer the call for change in our country.”
Updated
News wire PA provides some key developments after 120 of 136 English councils had declared full results:
Labour had lost control of 29 councils and suffered a net loss of 914 seats.
Reform gained control of 12 councils and added 1,200 seats.
The Conservatives suffered a net loss of seven councils and 373 councillors.
The Liberal Democrats won two councils and gained a net 98 seats.
The Green Party gained control of three councils and put on 211 councillors.
Labour hold Camden, home to Keir Starmer's parliamentary constituency
Labour has maintained overall control of Camden Council, despite a challenge from the Greens. Labour won 30 seats out of the 55 on the council, down from 47 at the last election. The council takes in Keir Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency.
As well as losing seats in its traditional Red Wall, Labour has been counting its losses in London too.
Labour has lost Hackney to the Greens. The party also failed to keep its majority in Southwark, Enfield and Brent.
We are still waiting on results for Croydon, Lambeth, Haringey, Lewisham, Newham and Tower Hamlets. The Greens also won the mayoral elections in Hackney and Lewisham.
Labour MP for Bassetlaw and Red Wall Caucus chair Jo White has warned that today’s results have been “really, really difficult for Sir Keir”.
Speaking to Sky, she said that “big, big changes” were required, though she would not be drawn on whether she thought it was time for a new Labour leader.
“I’m meeting with my Red Wall colleagues on Wednesday, as soon as we get back into Parliament. Our focus is on delivery and getting that, economic investment into our communities,” White said.
When asked whether she thought Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham would serve the Red Wall MPs better, she said she didn’t “think it’s time” for him.
All 73 constituency seats in the Scottish Parliament have been declared
All 73 constituency seats in the Scottish Parliament election have been declared, with the SNP holding Uddingston + Bellshill being the final such result.
Among the 73 constituency seats, the SNP won 57, the Scottish Lib Dems won seven, the Scottish Conservatives won four, Scottish Labour won three and the Greens won two.
Nigel Farage strikes celebratory tone in Chelmsford speech
Speaking from Chelmsford, Essex, Nigel Farage has said the election results have reflected a “truly historic shift in voting patterns” in the UK.
“The results in the Red Wall are truly astonishing,” Farage said, celebrating Reform’s gains from Labour in the Midlands, the North East and the North West.
He also laid into the Conservatives, saying “no one would forgive them” for the decisions they took while in power.
He wrapped up his speech by saying: “The results have exceeded, frankly, the best expectations I had – for Essex, for Suffolk – for many areas.”
Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill has hailed the gains of the SNP and Plaid Cymru as a seismic shift in the political landscape of the UK.
“For the first time in history there could be three nationalist, pro-independence and pro-self-determination First Ministers,” said O’Neill.
“I want to send my congratulations to the SNP and Plaid Cymru for their historic success.
“It is clear people want better. They want a brighter future, filled with hope.
“More and more people are looking beyond the constraints of Westminster where decisions are made without regard for people and communities in Scotland, Wales and the north of Ireland.
“That future is beyond Westminster. The desire for independence cannot be ignored.
“I look forward to working closely with John Swinney and Rhun ap Iorwerth to build on the existing relationships, strengthen the ties that bind us and continue the momentum towards constitutional change.”
Last month the Guardian reported on how strong election results for nationalist parties who aim to break up the UK could reshape politics’. “The change will be seismic,” said Angus Robertson, a senior minister in the Scottish government.
Updated
The Green Party has won a majority on Hackney council, usually a Labour stronghold.
By 8.30pm, 37 Green councillors had been elected out of 57 seats, ousting Labour for the first time since 2002 when the council had no overall control.
Labour has so far held onto just eight seats of 43 it had held.
In a statement, the mayor of London Sadiq Khan has described today’s election results as “bitterly disappointing for Labour in London.”
He said: “I want to thank, from the bottom of my heart, all the great Labour councillors who have lost their seats for their hard work and dedication over many years.
“This includes people who I’ve worked with closely throughout my time as mayor to deliver for our city, including introducing free school meals, building record numbers of council homes and creating opportunities for young people.”
He added: “Labour has lost votes in London to a variety of different parties, but the biggest change has been Labour voters switching to the Greens.
“Many people who voted Labour at the last general election clearly feel angry, disappointed and let down.
“They want a Labour government to address the cost-of-living crisis while demonstrating the core values the party was established to promote. Too many of the Government’s achievements have been overshadowed by basic mistakes and a failure to boldly assert our progressive values.
“Londoners are also frustrated with the slow pace of change and are impatient to see the delivery they were promised.
“London has been taken for granted for too long. This must change. We need more investment in our public services and infrastructure, which would not only boost the economy and living standards for Londoners, but lead to jobs, wealth and prosperity right across the country.”
Reform UK wiped out the Conservatives to take majority control of Havering Borough Council, securing 39 out of the 55 council seats.
The Green Party now has two new mayors, Zoe Garbett in Hackney and Liam Shrivastava in Lewisham.
Both were Labour mayoralties until Thursday’s elections.
The Greens also took control of Waltham Forest, their first London council.
A transgender candidate who secured one of three seats for the Scottish Green Party on the Edinburgh and Lothians East regional list said their victory in the election was “what diversity looks like”.
Dr Q Manivannan, the first person who identifies as transgender elected to Holyrood, and party colleagues Kate Nevens and Kayleigh Ferguson Kinross-O’Neill were among the seven candidates to secure seats on the list, along with Angela Ross from Reform UK, Irshad Ahmed and Katherine Sangster from the Scottish Labour Party and Scottish Conservative Miles Briggs.
“My name is Dr Q Manivannan, I am a transgender Tamil immigrant, my pronouns are they/them,” Dr Manivannan said as they addressed a crowd of cheering party supporters after the results were announced in Edinburgh.
“I am to some in this country everything that the hateful despise and I am standing here as your MSP now with care. They say politics is the art of the possible, a politics of care I would say expands what is possible for everyone left behind, pushed out or never invited in.”
They added: “This is what diversity looks like in power.”
Based on full results from 110 of the 136 councils in England that held elections on Thursday, Labour has won 44% of the seats it was defending, while the Conservatives have won 62% of the seats they were defending, according to Press Association analysis.
At last year’s local elections in England, both parties won 33% of the seats they were defending.
Reform UK has so far won 35% of the seats it contested this year, while the Greens have won 10%.
On Labour’s local election results, the foreign secretary Yvette Cooper said on X: “these have been really tough results today - including in Wakefield. “As the PM has said, this is now a time for serious, calm-headed reflection, because following these results, we must listen and respond, but do so in a steady, thoughtful and reflective way.”
Keir Starmer is under pressure to set out a timeline for his departure after a crushing defeat in elections across Britain prompted senior Labour MPs to call for him to step down within a year.
In a disastrous set of results, Labour lost hundreds of council seats in England, many to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which made big gains across the Midlands and the north as well as taking seats from the Tories in the South.
After more than a century of domination, Labour was also expecting a near-wipeout in Wales, where the party’s first minister, Eluned Morgan, lost her seat. Labour could slump to third place in Scotland behind the SNP and Reform.
While the prime minister appeared to have avoided an immediate coup, there was a furious response to the results among senior MPs and the unions, with some warning him to change course or risk electoral oblivion.
Louise Haigh, a former cabinet minister and co-chair of the powerful Tribune group of MPs, was the first to break cover.
“What is abundantly clear is that unless the government delivers significant and urgent change, then the prime minister cannot lead us into another election,” she said.
One senior backbencher said: “We want Keir to agree a timetable for his departure, but we want it to be dignified. He should have his last conference this autumn and then oversee a leadership contest straight after. He can’t take us into next year’s locals. It’s too late.”
However, Starmer insisted that he “won’t walk away” from the leadership as doing so would “plunge the party into chaos”, although he acknowledged that voters were fed up with the slow pace of change.
Labour’s affiliated unions said they were “deeply concerned” by the party’s “catastrophic” election results, and demanded a meeting with the PM.
The 11 unions in the Trade Union and Labour Organisation (TULO) said the results showed a stark disconnect between the Labour Government and the working people and communities it was elected to represent.
They said: “Voters right across the country have sent a clear message: that this Government are not delivering on the promised change they so desperately want to see.
“This cannot continue. Voters want to see a radical new direction from Labour, that stems the tide of division and unites workers and communities in every part of the country.
“TULO unions are united in calling for a fundamental change of direction on economic policy and political strategy, so that Labour do what it was elected to do: govern in the interests of workers.”
The Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay, whose party lost seven seats in the Holyrood election, said: “We always knew this was going to be a tough election”.
Speaking to journalists at a count at the Braehead Arena in Renfrew, he said: “What we warned would happen is exactly what has happened.
“In many seats the Scottish Conservative candidates were beaten by the narrowest of margins, and that’s because people voted for Reform in those seats and let the SNP through the middle.”
Findlay is a candidate in the West of Scotland regional list, which is expected to be declared on Friday evening.
Updated
Reform UK took the West Midlands council Sandwell after gaining 41 of the 72 seats, with Labour losing 33.
The party also seized Wakefield in West Yorkshire, winning 58 seats, with two Liberal Democrats and one each for Labour, the Greens and the Conservatives. Labour had controlled the council with 48 seats.
Anas Sarwar has issued a statement following Scottish Labour’s election loss, describing the result as “disappointing and difficult”.
The Scottish Labour leader said: “We made the case for change, but sadly that was not an argument we won in the face of a national wave that we couldn’t overcome.
“I want to thank everyone who voted for us - we will continue to fight for you, for communities across Scotland and for the values we believe in.”
He added: “The Scottish Labour Party is hurting today. It is my job to hold our party together. That’s what I will do.”
Results in from 100 of 136 councils
With results available from 100 out of 136 councils in contention at these elections, here’s where things stand:
Labour have control of 22 councils, 20 fewer than before the elections. They have 504 council seats, and have lost a net total of 595 seats so far.
Reform were not in control of any of the councils up for election this time but have won seven so far. They have 936 council seats so far, which is up 873.
The Greens were also not in overall control of any councils, but have won control of at least three at these elections. They have 231 councillors, which is up 128.
The Conservatives now have control of five councils, with a total of 484 councillors and a net loss of 303 currently.
The Lib Dems have control of 13 councils, up one. They have 593 council seats, which is up 45 from before the election.
There are currently 48 councils under no overall control, which is up by 15.
Updated
Reform have gained South Tyneside council, which was previously under no overall control, to add to their gains in the north east.
Reform also won control of Gateshead Council. Earlier, Reform gained Sunderland Council from Labour. Newcastle will stay under no overall control, though Reform gained 24 council seats there.
Birmingham council's Labour leader concedes
The Guardian’s Midlands correspondent, Neha Gohil is at the count in Birmingham. She reports John Cotton, the outgoing Labour leader of Birmingham city council, has accepted that he will likely lost his seat as Reform and the Greens make gains in the city’s all-out elections.
So far Reform has gained 17 seats in the city, while Labour has lost 26. The full results are expected later this evening.
Speaking to the media, Cotton said Labour needed to “listen carefully to the message” of the electorate, and called on the party to better communicate its vision to voters.
“We know that midterm elections are always difficult for the party of government,” he said. “We need to think about how we start to tell in a more coherent, systematic way, the story of the great things that this Labour government is doing”.
Cotton, who has been a Labour councillor in Birmingham for 25 years, also called for greater unity in the city amid fears that the success of Reform, Greens and pro-Gaza independents would leave the city ungovernable.
He said the new leadership at the council must ensure it “engages in a way that doesn’t undermine stability and doesn’t deter investors”.
Political correspondent Alexandra Topping has been speaking to Tory grandee Sir Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative MP for Harwich and North Essex, and an Essex MP since 1992.
Having witnessed the Reform rout of his party in his own backyard in today’s results – Reform took control of Essex County Council and ended the Conservatives’ 25-year reign at the local authority – Jenkin was relatively sanguine and took a decidedly long view.
He called heavy Tory losses in the county “mortifying” but said it would be “interesting to see how Reform actually run Essex”, adding that in Kent, where Reform won outright control last year, the Conservative vote had recovered.
“What we are seeing is that the Conservatives have already troughed and are on an upward trajectory, whereas Reform seem to have already peaked,” he said.
Asked if the result made a Conservative-Reform pact at the next general election more likely, Jenkin said it would depend on the polling status of each party as the election approached. “It’s easy to get carried away by sensational outcomes, but in 1981 the SDP (social democrat party) was polling at 50%, and in 1982 Margaret Thatcher stomped home to victory.”
He added: “Nigel Farage is very keen to paint this earthquake as a permanent state, but he would say that wouldn’t he.”
Results for all six mayoral elections now in
There were six mayoral contests in at these elections and the results are now in for all of them.
The Greens won two of them: Hackney and Lewisham and both from Labour. These are the party’s first elected mayors.
Labour won again in Newham, with Forhad Hussain taking over from Rokhsana Fiaz who had served two full terms.
The Conservatives held Croydon, Lutfhar Rahman of Aspire was re-elected in Tower Hamlets, and the Liberal Democrats held Watford.
Plaid Cymru becomes largest party in Welsh Senedd
Plaid Cymru have won 43 seats in Wales’s Senedd election with all constituencies declared, Bethan McKernan reports, putting the Welsh nationalists in a comfortable position to form a minority government and ending more than 100 years of Labour hegemony.
Polls consistently suggested Plaid Cymru and Reform UK were neck and neck in the race to become the biggest party under Wales’s new more proportional voting system.
As in last year’s closely watched Caerphilly Senedd byelection, however, the contest was not as close as predicted. Reform has come in second, with 34 seats – up from 1% of the vote share in 2021’s election.
Labour, for so long Wales’s political behemoth, has limped into third place with just nine seats in a 96 seat parliament.
Read Beth and Steven Morris’ full report below:
Updated
Lib Dems overtake Conservatives in John Major’s former backyard
It has been a fairly strong showing for the Lib Dems at these elections so far. They currently have control of the second highest number of councils in England (13, behind Labour’s 23, with more results to come).
One of those councils is Huntingdonshire, home to John Major’s former constituency, where the Lib Dems have overtaken the Conservatives.
The party made 10 gains while the Tories lost 7 in another catastrophic result for Kemi Badenoch.
A Liberal Democrat source said: “John Major talked about Britain being a country of warm beer, green suburbs and cricket grounds. Today, that country has abandoned the Conservative Party and turned to the Liberal Democrats.
“These results show that One Nation Conservatives across the country are abandoning Kemi Badenoch and her lurch to the right.”
Local government body, the Local Government Information Unit (LGIU), has said that today’s election results have shown that local politics is getting more competitive and fragmented.
With the election of so many candidates from new and different parties, it is no exaggeration to say that we are looking at over a thousand new councillors across England. These councillors will be sworn in with limited local government experience, and councils will therefore be more in need than ever of strong institutional memories carried by dedicated officers.
Local politics is becoming more competitive. There were thousands of candidates standing this year, with some ballot papers looking very long indeed. Turnout looks to be up as the public becomes more invested in the results. Competition is important for democracy, but it comes with its own challenges.
Political fragmentation will fundamentally change how many councils operate. No Overall Control councils are becoming more common, including in places that have never had them before. These places will have to learn to be run by broader coalitions of support or risk falling into irresolvable conflict. As competition becomes more fierce, cooperation becomes all the more necessary to ensure councils run effectively.”
The LGIU says its mission is to strengthen local democracy and put citizens in control of their own lives, communities and services.
Updated
The Green Party has won its second council of these elections, gaining an overall majority in Hastings, East Sussex.
A short time ago it was announced that the Greens had won control of Norwich, which was the first council it had taken in these elections.
Hastings was previously a Green minority administration following the 2024 election. They became the largest party in the council with 12 councillors, followed by nine from Labour, six from Your Party, and five Conservatives. The borough council had a Labour majority from 2010 to 2022.
Council leader Glenn Haffenden said the results were “beyond our wildest dreams.”
“I think Zack (Polanski) has been one of our biggest reasons as to why we’ve done so well in Hastings,” Haffenden said. “I don’t want to put down our hard work we’ve done in Hastings, either. But I think Zack speaking nationally to people that are generally struggling with the cost of living, the broken Britain we’re seeing at the moment – it’s pushed us forward.”
Updated
We are expecting to hear from Nigel Farage at around 8pm. He is speaking in Essex following local election results that have seen his Reform party win more than a thousand council seats and gain control of at least eight councils, with some results still to come.
It has been a crushing set of local and devolved elections for Labour, with Reform making huge gains across the country and the Greens winning in London. Keir Starmer is under pressure to announce a timeline for his departure – yet he insists he will not walk away.
Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey discuss the results on the Guardian’s latest Politics Weekly podcast. Listen at the link below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
More Labour MPs have been calling for Keir Starmer to go, or to set out a timetable for his departure. These are backbenchers, though not all of them are to the left of the party.
Simon Opher, Labour MP for Stroud called for an “orderly transition” away from Starmer’s leadership, echoing Richard Burgon’s statement.
“This is an existential moment for both our party and our country. The message from voters could not be clearer: things have to change … We need an orderly transition that brings together the very best talents across the Labour Party to deliver the change this country so desperately needs and to stop the far right from entering Number 10.”
Connor Naismith, Labour MP for Crewe and Nantwich, said the results were “existential for the Labour Party” and that “Keir Starmer needs to set out a timetable for his departure”.
Ruth Jones, MP for Newport West and Islwyn, told Times Radio Keir Starmer needs to “consider his position” and be more “reticent” about saying he’ll be “carrying on forever” as Labour leader.
As my colleague Andrew noted earlier, no member of the government has resigned and no minister has called for Starmer to go. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told BBC News: “He’s not gonna go, and he not gonna set a timetable. People want us focused on their jobs and their future not our jobs and our future.”
Updated
Richard Burgon, who is on the left of the Labour party and was a Jeremy Corbyn loyalist under his tenure as Labour leader, has released a statement saying that Labour’s local election results have “Keir Starmer’s name written all over it”.
The MP for Leeds East said: “In East Leeds and up and down the country, hard-working Labour councillors and other Labour representatives lost their seats today after being badly let down by the terrible decisions of this Labour leadership, despite serving their communities so well.
“Their defeat has Keir Starmer’s name written all over it. Too many people now feel Labour is no longer on their side and no longer shares their values.
“The consequences of these elections for our party are stark. Labour faces an existential crisis, and there is a real danger we may never recover. What’s more, we risk opening the door to a Nigel Farage government. No progressive party faced with that threat can simply carry on regardless until it is too late to stop it happening.
“It is clear that Keir has fought his last election as Labour leader and, deep down, he will know it.
“The party should now work towards a timetable for an orderly transition to a new leader by the end of this year.
Reform UK on 27% national equivalent vote in locals, says Sky, with Tories 20%, Labour 15% and Greens and Lib Dems both 14%
Sky News has released its national equivalent vote (NEV) figures (see 3.28pm) – its estimate for what the share of the vote would have been if all parts of Britain had been voting yesterday in line with the trends seen in those parts of England where voting did take place.
The figures are:
Reform UK: 27% (down 5 points from 32% last year)
Conservatives: 20% (up 2 points from 18% last year)
Labour: 15% (down 4 points from 19% last year)
Greens: 14% (up 7 points from 7% last year)
Lib Dems: 14% (down 2 points from 16% last year)
On the basis of these figures, technically you could argue that Reform UK are going backwards. But good luck trying to persuade anyone in the party of that, given the number of seats they are winning.
Sky News also presented seat projection figures, showing what would happen if there were a general election and everyone voted on that basis. The figures were:
Reform UK: 284
Labour: 110
Conservatives: 96
Lib Dems: 80
On that basis, Reform would be well short of a majority. But they would be able to government with Tory support.
That’s all from me for today. Hayden Vernon is taking over now.
Updated
Starmer pays tribute to outgoing Welsh first minister Eluned Morgan
Keir Starmer has issued a statement paying tribute to Eluned Morgan. He said:
Eluned Morgan has been a formidable first minister and tireless champion for Wales.
She broke barriers and has never stopped fighting for families in the communities she loves.
Together, we have worked to lift children out of poverty, cut hospital waiting lists, and create thousands of new jobs.
I want to thank Eluned Morgan for the over 30 years of service she has already given to our country and our party.
Reform UK gains Thurrock from Labour
Reform UK has gained Thurrock from Labour. Here are the results.
FPTP turning local elections into 'random lottery' because results not proportionate, campaigners say
The Electoral Reform Society, which campaigns for proportional representation (PR), has claimed that yesterday’s elections have produced “a string of wildly unrepresentative results” because of the first past the post (FPTP) voting system being used in contests where multiple parties are competitive.
It has produced these examples.
In Sutton, the Liberal Democrats received almost every seat on the council (92.7%) on a minority share of the vote (43.7%), while Reform UK received only 3.6% of the seats despite winning almost a fifth of the vote (19.8%), and Labour’s 6.5% of the vote yielded only 1.8% of the seats.
In Wandsworth, we saw a ‘wrong winner election’ as the Conservatives won more seats than Labour despite getting fewer votes. The Conservatives picked up 50% of the seats on the council with just 29.9% of the vote, whereas Labour’s 32.1% of the vote translated into 48.3% of the seats.
In Havering, Reform UK picked up 70.9% of the seats on just over a third of the vote share (36.3%).
In Hammersmith and Fulham, Labour won over three quarters of the seats (76%) on little over a third (37.4%) of the vote.
n Kensington and Chelsea, the Conservatives won over two thirds (68%) of the council seats on less than half (46%) of the vote.
Willie Sullivan, director of campaigns at the ERS, said:
What we have seen in these elections is the first past the post voting system, which is designed for two parties, failing to cope with the multi-party way people are voting – and that is leading to wildly unrepresentative results.
For instance, we have seen some parties take over 90% of the seats on a council on a minority share of the votes and even a ‘wrong winner’ result. Distorted results like these will make elections seem more like a random lottery to voters than a reflection of how they actually voted. That is bad for trust in politics, bad for representation and bad for local democracy.
Welsh Labour leader and first minister Eluned Morgan out of Senedd after losing seat
Bethan McKernan is the Guardian’s Wales correspondent.
Eluned Morgan, Wales’s Labour first minister, has lost her seat in the Senedd elections, the first major indicator of an expected near-wipeout for the party that has led Cymru since devolution began in 1999.
Labour finished fourth in the total vote share, with three of the six seats availabe in the Ceredigion Penfro constituency going to Plaid Cymru, two to Reform, and one to the Conservatives.
Support for the party has been ebbing for some years, but observers believe Keir Starmer’s general election win in 2024 sounded the death knell for Welsh Labour, as it left the Cardiff Bay administration unable to blame a Conservative-led UK government for perceived failings.
In an extraordinary admission of defeat before a single constituency result was declared, Labour released a statement saying it expected to return just 10 MSs out of 96 available seats in the newly expanded Senedd chamber. The party previously never held fewer than 26 seats in a 60 seat chamber.
Polls have consistently suggested Plaid Cymru and Reform UK are neck and neck in the race to become the biggest Senedd party.
On Friday, as ballot papers were still being counted, sources from both parties suggested that Plaid Cymru has emerged as the front runner, propelling the Welsh nationalist party into a non-coalition government for the first time and making a Welsh independence referendum a future possibility.
Updated
Rhun ap Iorwerth says Plaid Cymru 'ready to serve' not just Plaid voters, but 'all of Wales'
Steven Morris is a Guardian correspondent covering Wales.
In his speech after securing his seat in the Bangor Conwy Môn constituency of north Wales, the Plaid leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, said it had been a privilege to serve the community he had been raised in - Ynys Môn, the island of Anglesey.
He continued:
Now be elected to represent this wider constituency that has also been a big part of my life will be an equal privilege and I promise that as part of a great team of Plaid Cymru Senedd members we will work every day to the best of our ability to represent the people of Bangor Conwy Môn.
Now today is about the future of our communities here and our nation as a whole. We have offered leadership locally as we offer leadership to all of Wales.
As the story of this election has emerged today, it has become clear that Wales has demanded change of leadership.
My sense of service to my community and my belief in our nation drives me every single day and Plaid Cymru is ready to serve, not just those who entrusted their vote to us here but all of the citizens of Wales.
Helen Jenner, the deputy leader of Reform in Wales, who won a seat in the same constituency said she would serve with integrity, honesty and transparency. She said:
One thing we’ve heard on the doorstep throughout this campaign is how much people are crying out for change. After 26 years of managed decline here in Wales, people wanted a new vision, a new ambition.
Tory candidate Janet Finch-Saunders told the Plaid and Reform winners: “I will be watching you, each and everyone of you.”
Reform UK wins Sunderland from Labour
Reform UK has taken Sunderland from Labour. This is from Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson.
Updated
From my colleague Pippa Crerar
Labour in trouble in Starmer’s own back yard too... Richard Olszewski, Labour leader of Camden Council, has failed to win Holborn & Covent Garden ward, where three Greens have replaced three Labour councillors. Olszewski switched from a seat in the north of the borough which was at risk from Lib Dems because this one was - supposedly - safer.
The SNP have held the seat of Inverclyde in the Scottish Parliament election, with Reform UK’s Scottish leader Malcolm Offord finishing third in the constituency, the Press Association reports.
The SNP’s Stuart McMillian won with 14,193 votes. Scottish Labour’s Francesca Brennan received 8,876 votes. Offord, who is also running on the regional list, received 5,649 votes.
Plaid on course to win in Wales with between 41 and 46 seats, BBC predicts
Bethan McKernan is the Guardian’s Wales correspondent.
John Curtice, the BBC’s election expert, has just told the BBC that his team are now projecting Plaid Cymru to win between 41 and 46 seats in the Senedd. That means they will be just short o a majority.
Under Wales’s new, more representative electoral system, at least 49 seats are needed for a majority. No party is likely to win that, but such a result will mean Plaid Cymru can comfortably form a minority government.
Polls throughout the election campaign had suggested Plaid Cymru and Reform UK were neck and neck in the race to be the largest party in the Senedd, pushing once dominant Welsh Labour into a distant third place.
Updated
What Labour MPs are saying about what party should do next
The Labour MP Anneliese Midgley, Labour MP for Knowsley, has told the Guardian that the results for Labour are “devastating” and that, without significant change, Keir Starmer needs to go.
She said:
The results here and across the North are beyond our worst expectations. It’s truly devastating.
Unless that changes significantly and quickly it’s clear the PM can’t lead us into another election.
It was a mistake to block Andy Burnham in Gorton & Denton and if a situation arises, he should not be blocked again.
This is very similar to what Louise Haigh has said. (See 3.59pm.)
Nadia Whittome has explicitly said Starmer should resign. In a long post on social media, she said:
We did not secure a historic majority in 2024 to be tepid in government, to punish the most vulnerable or to mimic our opponents. From housing to our hollowed-out public services, the country faces interlocking crises that demand bold policies and a progressive government with the courage to deliver them.
With this in mind, I believe the prime minister should announce a timetable for his departure.
Diane Abbott, who was elected as a Labour MP but who is currently suspended, says there is no point changing the leader without changing policy too.
There is no denying that these election results are going to be very bad for Labour. Yes, Keir Starmer is very unpopular. But it is the policies that drive that unpopularity. Simply changing the leader without changing the policies will not avert disaster in 2029.
The Labour MP Apsana Begum says policy and leadership both need to change.
The initial results point to one of the most unpopular Labour Governments in modern history.
This electoral disaster seems existential for Labour, yet it appears even now that some don’t want to admit what’s wrong.
To avert the ultimate disaster of a Reform Government, there needs to be a superspeed change, in both leadership and policy.
And, as LabourList reports, Dan Carden, who heads the Blue Labour group in parliament, says the party needs to show that it cares about the working class. He says:
Labour is losing today because we are a party that won’t say Britain is broken – when it is, won’t challenge the rules of globalisation, and we are now a party defined only through tax, spend and welfare — and with no answer for working class voters who’ve been left behind.
The question isn’t how to win them back. It’s whether Labour wants to represent them at all.
Based on half of councils in England (68 of 136) having fully declared their results, Labour has won 50% of the seats it was defending, while the Conservatives have won 56% of the seats they were defending, according to Press Association analysis.
At last year’s local elections in England, both parties won 33% of the seats they were defending. Reform UK has so far won 35% of the seats it contested this year, while the Greens have won 7%, PA says.
If you want to compare how losing roughly half the seats being defended would compare with previous bad results for Labour and the Conservative party, the New Statesman has a good chart with past data on this here.
Greens win their first seat in Senedd, with Welsh leader elected in Caerdydd Penarth
Bethan McKernan is the Guardian’s Wales correspondent.
The Greens have won their first ever seat in the Senedd, with Anthony Slaughter, the party’s Welsh leader, winning one of six seats at Caerdydd Penarth (Cardiff Penarth).
Slaughter secured the fourth of six seats in the constituency in Wales’s new more proportional voting system with 14% of the vote, ahead of Labour on 12%.
Slaughter said:
I am honoured to be the first Wales Green party candidate to be elected to the Senedd. This is an historic moment for the party. Welsh politics has changed forever today and Wales Green party will now be playing a key role in that.
Having a Green voice in the Senedd for the first time will make a huge difference to the political conversation in Wales and I look forward to working with others to achieve our campaign including the helping with the cost of living, fixing the housing crisis and protecting the natural environment of Wales.
Updated
Steven Morris is a Guardian correspondent covering Wales.
Claire Hughes, the Labour MP for Bangor Aberconwy in north Wales, has said the party needs to regroup and rebuild – but not oust Keir Starmer.
She told the Guardian: “People are frustrated, they are cross with Labour.” She said the state of the NHS and the cost of living came up repeatedly on the doorstep. “People are impatient for change.”
Hughes said Labour needed to regroup and rebuild.
We campaign together, we win together, we lose together. There’s no point saying it’s Welsh Labour or UK Labour - we are one Labour movement.
She dismissed the idea of Starmer being replaced.
Keir’s been very clear that he is as determined as ever to fight on. I think that that’s what we absolutely need because people are absolutely fed up to the back teeth of the Tories chopping and changing their leaders. He’s determined to carry on.
Louise Haigh says, unless Starmer can deliver 'significant change', he should stand aside before general election
Louise Haigh, who was sacked as transport secretary by Keir Starmer, has told ITV that, if Keir Starmer cannot deliver “significant and urgent change”, he should stand aside before the general election.
She said:
[Starmer] is doing an incredible job at the moment on the international stage in the middle of global instability and a war. And it is imperative that he is successful in that role because our constituents livelihoods are dependent upon it.
But I think what is abundantly clear, is that unless the government delivers significant and urgent change, then the prime minister cannot lead us into another election.
With the inclusion of that “unless” clause, this is not an explict call for Starmer to announce a timetable for his departure. But it is getting close.
Updated
Fabian Society and Compass respond to Labour losses in election results
Here is reaction to the results from two Labour-supporting groups.
The Fabian Society, the Labour-affiliated thinktank, says this is not just a standard mid-term defeat. Joe Dromey, its general secretary, said:
These are devastating results for Labour. Most governments lose seats inlocal elections. But the scale of the losses shows this is much more than mid-term blues.
Labour is on course to lose half its council seats in England, with Reform surging. The SNP’s hold of Holyrood is set to continue into a third decade. And Labour looks to have suffered a devastating defeat in its historic heartland of Wales.
Carrying on regardless is not an option. We need to listen to the message the voters have sent. Across the coming weeks, the Fabian Society will provide a platform to the hard-working Labour candidates from across England, Scotland and Wales to share what they heard on the doorstep, and how the party builds a viable coalition for a second term.
And this is from Compass, a progressive group particularly committed to pluralism.
Statistically and evidentially, Labour are not only losing more votes to progressives than Reform, but progressive voters are much more open to returning to Labour than Reform voters are.
All voters are much more responsive to bolder, more progressive policy agenda - further cost of living support, a different economic direction, and stronger action on climate and energy.
These policies are also much more amenable to progressive voters, and progressive voters are more likely to support a Labour party with a kinder immigration policy than Reform voters are a Labour party with a stricter immigration policy.
This presents a wholesale rejection of the premise that adopting a more right-coded agenda will provide beneficial for Labour’s electoral outcomes.
From ITV’s Paul Brand
One piece of good news whatever your politics - turnout in Wales has topped 50% for the first time since devolution. It has always been a tragedy that elections of such consequence have inspired so little enthusiasm among the Welsh electorate.
Green party have won the first four seats declared in Hackney council, for the Dalston and de Beauvoir wards, Lisa O’Carroll reports. One was won by new mayor Zoë Garbett who, under the rules, cannot also sit as a councillor, prompting a byelection for her seat.
Updated
Eluned Morgan declines to take questions as she arrives at count where she is expected to lose seat
Bethan McKernan is the Guardian’s Wales correspondent.
The first of 16 constituency results has been declared in Wales, with Reform UK and Plaid Cymru picking up two seats each of the six available in Casnewydd Islwyn (Newport Islwyn), and Labour and the Conservatives on one each.
Reform won the biggest vote share under Wales’s new more proportional voting system, securing 25,571 votes over Plaid Cymru with 23,069. The result means Reforms’ Welsh leader, Dan Thomas, will enter the Senedd for the first time.
Meanwhile, in Llandysul in Ceredigion, Labour first minister Eluned Morgan has arrived at the count, but refused to take questions from journalists as she walked into the centre.
She is widely expected to lose her seat - the first ever loss for a sitting first minister- amid a dire set of predicted results for the party, which has run Wales since devolution began in 1999.
Here are the full results from Essex, where Reform UK has taken the council from the Conservatives with 52 seat gains.
Essex is where Kemi Badenoch is an MP.
After 20 out of 73 constituency results in the Scottish parliament election, the SNP have 17 seats, while Scottish Labour, the Scottish Conservatives and the Scottish Lib Dems each hold one, the Press Association reports.
The SNP’s share of the vote is around 40%, while Labour’s is around 19%, the Tories is around 16% and Reform UK’s is 16%.
The Liberal Democrats are on around 9% of the constituency vote.
This is from Steven Swinford from the Times.
Reform thinks that with 1,400+ seats declared it’s currently on course for 28.8% of the national vote, with Labour and the Tories both on around 18%
It believes that Reform’s MPs will be significantly bolstered based on voting in their constituencies
For Farage in Clacton, for example, they think he’ll be on 53%. Sarah Pochin 40%...
These figures will obviously change - we’ve yet to see London declarations, for example. But they’re feeling pretty euphoric off the back of winning Essex County Council, Havering borough council, Newcastle-under-Lyme
While a 29% vote share, and being around 10 points ahead of Labour and the Conservatives, is clearly a very good result, it would still be lower than the Reform UK share of the vote in the local elections last year.
There are two teams of psephologists who produce an estimate for what the share of the vote would be if the whole of Britain had voted yesterday in the same way as the places in England where elections did take place. They produce an estimate making allowance for the fact that different types of place vote in different ways, and council elections only take place in areas not representative of Britain as a whole.
Prof John Curtice produces the figure for BBC and calls it the projected national share (PNS).
Prof Michael Thrasher produces a figure for Sky News and calls it the national equivalent vote (NEV).
Some years the PNS and NEV figures come out the same. Other years there are slight differences, but they broadly show the same trends.
Last year Reform UK was given a PNS of 30%, and an NEV of 32%.
This chart from Dylan Difford’s Substack has the figures going back to 2019.
Rhys Williams, ITV’s Wales reporter, says Welsh Labour may have been over-optimistic when they said they expected to get just 10 seats in the Senedd. (See 2.14pm.) He says:
Hearing that in Casnewydd Islwyn is:
Plaid Cymru 2
Reform 2
Tories 1
Labour 1.
Also only 1 Labour in Swansea.
Labour are being crushed.
They may only have 4/5 seats in a 96 seat parliament
Sundus Abdi is a Guardian reporter.
Mansuur Ahmed has been elected with in Birmingham’s Nechells ward, becoming one of the youngest councillors in British history at 19 years old.
Ahmed campaigned heavily on local issues in one of the city’s most deprived wards, including on the closure of youth centres following years of council cuts. His grassroots campaign, which The Guardian followed in our On The Ground video series, also gained traction on TikTok.
Updated
The Green party says their share of the vote “is up across England with high points in Reading 32%, Exeter 31%, Oxford 29%. This lays the foundations to win constituencies like Reading Central, Exeter and Oxford East at the general election.”
Often on a day like this what is significant is not what happens, but what doesn’t happen. In Labour terms, it is important to point out that no member of the government has resigned, no minister has called for Keir Starmer to go, and the only people who are saying he should stand aside are people who might be expected to say something like that.
Steve Reed, the housing secretary, was doing interviews at lunchtime, and he claimed no one in the cabinet wanted Starmer out.
Kitty Donaldson from the i is quoting an unnamed cabinet minister saying the same thing, in slightly stronger terms.
A Cabinet minister tells me there will be no move from their colleagues against Sir Keir Starmer, adding that Labour grassroots would find any attempt to depose the prime minister “unforgivable”.
“There are individuals who all the way through who have put their own position ahead of that of the party. To use a challenging moment in the party’s electoral life and make it about them and not about the country and the overall party, it’s unforgivable.”
“No one in the Cabinet is going to move... [even though] some people are some people are clearly hoping that’s the case,” they said, ruling out the idea Starmer will set an exit schedule. “A timetable is literally the same thing. Set a timetable, and you’re done. It’s over.”
Updated
Unite leader Sharon Graham says results show Labour won't survive unless it shifts 'decisively' to working class
Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, has said that the election results show that Labour won’t survive unless it shifts “decisively” towards the working class.
In a statement, she said:
The writing is on the wall for this Labour government and it could be the beginning of the end for the party itself. The working class have been abandoned and have delivered their verdict.
They have painted the ballot boxes of our towns and swathes of the Midlands and the North turquoise and even green. They have done so using the brush of decades of Labour failure.
Labour ministers can loyally read out lists of their achievements, but no one is listening. If every one of those achievements were in stereo, they wouldn’t even touch the sides of the vision that is needed now.
We are stuck in a rigged system where everyday people always, always pay.
Only fundamental, irreversible change will stem the tide. If the party does not shift decisively towards the working class it is finished.
It is change or die. Now or never.
Unite is one of the two biggest and most powerful unions affiliated to Labour (the other being Unison). Graham has frequently complained about Labour under Keir Starmer being too rightwing, but in this statement she is not explicitly calling for new leader (athough implicitly she is).
Scottish Greens hopeful of electoral breakthrough in Scotland, winning first constituency seats
Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
The Scottish Greens believe they are on the brink of an electoral breakthrough by winning their first constituency seats at Holyrood, with Scotland’s parties braced for a series of shock results.
Senior figures in the pro-independence party believe they could unseat Angus Robertson, the Scottish National party cabinet minister, in Edinburgh Central and were originally hopeful of winning at least one constituency seat in Glasgow.
Those forecasts came as the Liberal Democrats won the first of Holyrood’s 129 seats to be declared, holding Orkney with a record 70% vote share, while the SNP comfortably held Dundee City West with 39.7%.
Liam McArthur, who was held Orkney for the Lib Dems since 2007, is seen as a contender to become Holyrood’s next presiding officer. He thanked his rival candidates for showing “you can have a political contest without knocking seven bells out of each other.”
Yet in the first surprise result of the day the SNP won the former Liberal Democrat stronghold of Shetland for the first time – a seat the Lib Dems have held for 27 years.
The Lib Dem vote fell by 14.3%, damaging its hopes of staging a significant revival thanks to centrist Conservatives voters deserting the Tories after its recent swing to the right.
This election is expected to be the least predictable since the advent of devolution in 1999, following the surge in support for the right-wing party Reform UK, which opinion polls suggest could come second.
The SNP is expected to win comfortably but on the lowest share of the vote since 2007, with Reform’s arrival splitting the anti-SNP vote.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar concedes defeat, blaming 'national dissatisfaction' with party
Libby Brooks is a Guardian Scotland correspondent.
Anas Sarwar had conceded Scottish Labour has comprehensively lost the Holyrood election after admitting the party failed to counter a “national wave of disappointment” with Keir Starmer.
Speaking to the media in Glasgow after only seven of Holyrood’s 129 seats had been declared, Sarwar said:
We made an argument for change and, ultimately, it’s an argument we lost.
My party is hurting today and it’s my job to hold it together.
We will continue to fight for the change we believe Scotland so desperately needs.
The tragedy of this election campaign is that, despite all the arguments we wanted to make about the health service, the future of our schools, about tackling homelessness, sadly that’s not what the election became about.
It became about a national mood, and a national dissatisfaction. And that was a mood that we were not able to overcome.
Asked if Starmer should resign, Sarwar referred to his call for the prime minister to stand aside in February, saying:
I said what I said back in February, and I stand by that, but I’m going to focus on what this means for my party here in Scotland.
Party sources said they had been punished by a disillusioned electorate, with its voters deserting Labour or staying at home in protest at Keir Starmer’s policies on welfare reform, Israel’s war in Gaza and his engagement with Reform’s anti-immigration agenda.
On Bluesky the politics professor Rob Ford is pointing out that people should be wary about how they interpret Labour losses and Reform gains.
He posted this last night.
I fear Labour people risk falling into an ecological fallacy visible from space when reacting to these results. Here is what is very clear in results so far:
Labour are losing *seats* to Reform, but...
Labour are losing *votes* to the Greens
Greens split the vote, Ref comes thru middle
And these within the last hour.
A caveat to this - in strongly Leave areas Reform are now so dominant (with 40% plus of the vote) they can typically win without much split in their opponents. But in more mixed Lab places, what we see is Reform up most, Greens up a lot, Lab and Con both down. Reform then take the seat from Lab
The conclusion “Reform won the seat from Lab therefore biggest vote swing is Lab to Reform” does not follow from this pattern. There are multiple vote flows here: Lab to Grn, Lab to abstain, Lab to Ref, Con to Ref, abstain to Ref...Lab to Ref is only one part of this, not typically the largest
Welsh Labour says it expects to win just 10 of 96 seats in new Senedd
Bethan McKernan is the Guardian’s Wales correspondent.
Welsh Labour is expecting to return just 10 seats in the next Senedd, the party has said, a dramatic fall from power for the party that has run Wales for nearly 30 years.
No seats have yet been called in Thursday’s Senedd election, but the party appears to be bracing for a colossal defeat to Plaid Cymru and Reform UK, which have consistently led in the polls.
Labour has never returned fewer than 26 seats in the 60 seat Senedd. In the new, expanded chamber, elected under a new more proportional voting system, it is now expecting 10 out of the 96 seats available.
The party statement also hinted that leader and first minster Eluned Morgan is expected to lose her seat in Ceredigion Penfro (Ceredigion Pembroke) - the first ever sitting first minister to do so.
Welsh Labour said in a statement:
This has undeniably been a very difficult election for Welsh Labour.
We now expect to lose several hardworking and respected members of the Senedd. We thank them for their service to their communities.
It is looking like Welsh Labour will return a group of around 10 MSs - which will at least allow a vocal Labour opposition, even though we are deeply disappointed about not being able to lead a government.
We expect Eluned Morgan to speak at the Llandysul later following her result. We do not have the final result but we’ve always known it was going to be a hard fight for Ceredigion Penfro.
Eluned will take responsibility for this result. She has been the heart and soul of this campaign, leading from the front and never shying away from a tough fight.
Reform UK gains Suffolk from Conservatives
Reform UK has taken control of Suffolk county council from the Conservatives.
John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, has arrived at the count for the Perthshire North and Perthshire South and Kinross-shire constituencies. Arriving with his wife Elizabeth, he was asked how he was feeling, and repliedL
Very well. Very optimistic. I’m feeling very positive and look forward to a positive result.
On Monday Guardian political correspondents Jessica Elgot and Peter Walker will be taking questions about the election results on our Reddit AMA (ask me anything) with r/ukpolitics. Jess and Peter will begin answering your questions live at 10am BST on Monday 11 May on the Reddit AMA post here.
Labour has had 'worst results in Manchester for 60 years', and Starmer to blame, says Graham Stringer
The Labour MP Graham Stringer has said the party is getting its worst results in Manchester for 60 years.
Speaking to reporters at the election count for Manchester city council, Stringer, who represents Blackley and Middleton South and who has been an MP since 1997, having previously served as city council leader, told reporters:
They’re the worst results in Manchester for 60 years. This is a problem made in parliament by Keir Starmer and a cabinet who have ignored the concerns of the traditional Labour voter.
They have effectively severed the connection with people who have sustained the Labour party since its beginning. I don’t think the prime minister gets it, I don’t think the cabinet gets it. They are pursing policies that are interesting to them and their mates, and they are not working.
Most of the cabinet, most of the PLP, have not had any jobs outside the voluntary and public sector, they’ve been bag carriers for MPs and ministers, and their experience of the real world, as we could call it, is very limited indeed. They make sense in their world, they do not make sense to the people I represent.
Steven Morris is a Guardian correspondent covering Wales.
The Plaid Cymru leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, has arrived at the count in the seaside town of Llandudno. A larger than usual media presence greeted him, a sign he may well be heading for power at Cardiff Bay in the next few days.
He told the Guardian:
We’re hearing positive noises across Wales but it’s very, very early and I’ve watched enough elections as a correspondent [he was a political journalist] as well as a politician to know we hold back until we have the big picture.
Asked if Wales was ready for change, he said:
I think that has been clear for some time. Our job has been to encourage people to make the correct change.
Scottish results are starting to come in for constituency seats. The first one to change hands was Shetland Islands, where Hannah Mary Goodlad won the seat for the SNP from the Lib Dems. The SNP were up 5.6 percentage points, and the Lib Dems down 14.4 percentage points.
Reform UK has gained 10 seats in Burnley, but the council remains under no overall control. Reform now has 12 seats, Labour 10 seats (down 3), independents 10 (down 1), Lib Dems 6 (down 1), Conservatives 4 (down 3) and the Greens 3 (down 2).
'Worse than bad' - Labour braced for terrible result in Birmingham
A Labour source said they feared speculation that it faced a “bin fire” in its battle to retain a significant number of seats on Birmingham city council would prove to be accurate, the Press Association reports. A year-long bin strike in the city is only just coming to an end. PA says:
The source tipped Reform UK, Green and independent candidates to prosper.
As the first three seats to declare resulted in a Tory hold and Green and Reform UK gains, both from Labour, the Labour source said: “Let’s just say I haven’t seen anyone looking even remotely happy. The mood is worse than bad. It’s bleak.”
This is what Sam Freedman said about the contest in Birmingham in his Comment is Freed Substack elections preview.
Birmingham, England’s largest council, will go into no overall control with seats going everywhere: to Reform, independents, Greens, Tories and Lib Dems. Labour will perhaps do even worse than national polls would predict given deep unhappiness with the council and the likelihood that independents will pick up a lot of inner city wards. It could end up with a close to ungovernable mix, possibly with a minority administration made up of Greens and independents, showing how messy a multi-party system can be when areas don’t settle into a two-or-three party contest.
Polanski says Starmer should resign, as he declares two-party politics 'dead and buried' in English politics
Lisa O’Carroll is a senior Guardian correspondent.
Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, has said that two-party politics is '“dead and buried” in English politics.
Speaking in Hackney, after the Greens won the mayoralty, Polanski said:
The two party politics is no longer dying it is dead and buried …
People are sick and tired of Labour, but also really exciting about a Green alternative which is about protecting people and our planet.
When you combine hope and a plan, that’s when you win elections like Hackney.
Polanski said that, when he became Green leader, he said he want his party to “replace Labour”, not prop them up, and he said “that’s exactly what we did in Gorton and Denton, [it’s] what we’ve done in Hackney, and we’re seeing that right across the country”.
And he said Keir Starmer should resign.
I think the Labour party have done a good job of expectation management, and actually the fact they’ve had a terrible result rather than existentially bad results – I don’t think it’s particularly good for them.
My message to Keir Starmer is that he needs to go. But I don’t think that’s my message; I think that’s the country message. We’ve seen for a long time now his popularity has been going, and he’s lost for the trust of the country.
Plaid Cymru confident as counting continues in Wales
Steven Morris is a Guardian correspondent covering Wales.
The Plaid Cymru leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, will be at Venue Cymru, Llandudno, later to see how he has personally done in the new north-west Wales constituency of Bangor Conwy Môn and how his party has fared across Wales – but his workers are in optimistic mood.
Reflecting on the party’s 100 years of campaigning and how near it is to power now, one experienced party worker told the Guardian: “Politics is a game of perseverance.”
Ap Iorwerth will probably head to Cardiff later today where, if the results go his party’s way, he will make a push to become Wales’ first minister.
Helen Jenner, the deputy leader of Reform in Wales, is also standing in the seat. She said she thought her party and Plaid were neck and neck here and in many places across the country.
Jenner may not be the archetypal Reform figure. She is local, a school teacher and a Welsh speaker. “There’s just really a hunger for change and something different,” she said.
Tory candidate, Janet Finch-Saunders, is an experienced campaigner, having won four town council seats, two county council seats and three Senedd seats here. She said Plaid had done well to distance itself from Labour, when they had worked together for large periods since devolution. “Plaid are equally culpable for some of the failings we’re suffering.”
She went on:
This is my tenth election. For me the outstanding feature is how divisive it’s been. There has been fear on the doorstep. But I think Wales is wanting change.
The lead Green candidate in the constituency, Tomos Barlow, said the number of party members in north-west Wales had shot up from 2-300 to 8-900. “A lot of people are unsatisfied with the current establishment of the Conservatives and Labour. The tide is definitely turning in this area.”
Labour MPs who want Andy Burnham to stand for parliament so that he can replace Keir Starmer assume a) that winning a byelection in a safe Labour seat in the north-west would be straightforward and b) that, in an election to replace him as mayor of Greater Manchester, Labour would have a decent chance of winning that too.
Jennifer Williams, northern correspondent at the Financial Times, says on Bluesky that, given the scale of Labour losses in the north, those assumptions no longer hold.
I haven’t been posting as all my thoughts have been going into the blog but a) so far the worst end of the fears here for Labour b) that includes in the sorts of places Andy Burnham might stand. St Helens could flip Reform in one go.
Even in Manchester - which can’t flip, but is fighting off both Greens and Reform - there are big nerves. (NB Greens nibbled away at the vote in city centre adjacent Salford seats last night.) if you see Mcr losses of 20+ they’re seeing the worst of their fears play out
Obviously local election results don’t translate directly into parliamentary by elections and burnham reaches places other pols can’t. But it isn’t a risk free endeavour. And the GM mayoral by election certainly wouldn’t be
There is no such thing as a Labour heartland anymore! It was true during the Runcorn by election, when a Labour spinner said “yeah but it’s not a heartland” and I said “where’s your heartland then” and they couldn’t answer the q - but it’s definitely true now
These calculations matter because they have an impact on how Labour MPs will assess the viability of a switch to a Burnham leadership.
Labour loses control of Blackburn
Labour has control of Blackburn council after Reform and Independents won enough seats to take the authority into no overall control, PA reports.
This is what the elections specialist Andrew Teale wrote about the situation in Blackburn in one of his comprehensive local election previews. He said:
Blackburn with Darwen is outside the Lancashire county council area and hasn’t seen any polls since the 2024 general election, when the Blackburn constituency - which covers most of this district - was narrowly gained from Labour by independent candidate Adnan Hussain. This was after the May 2024 local elections had seen independent candidates sweep the predominantly Muslim wards in Blackburn, and a repeat of that result this time would see Labour lose six seats net and control of the council. There are currently 27 Labour councillors here against 15 independents and 9 Conservatives.
Labour concedes defeat in Wales
Bethan McKernan is the Guardian’s Wales correspondent.
Welsh Labour is not going to be able to form the next Welsh government, the party’s deputy first minister has told BBC Wales.
No seats have yet been called in Thursday’s Senedd election as counting began on Friday morning. Plaid Cymru and Reform UK have led in the polls, vying to end Labour’s dominance in Wales since devolution began in 1999.
When asked if Welsh Labour were going to be in a position to form a government with current leader Eluned Morgan as first minister, Huw Irranca-Davies replied:
I don’t think we’re going to be in that situation.
We tried to put forward a very positive manifesto.
I think it has been a good manifesto, it really has, and we have tried to argue on policies and also the next chapter for Wales.
But if it hasn’t cut through to the people of Wales, we’re not going to be in that position then to actually form the next government.
Updated
Zoë Garbett, the Green mayor of Hackney, won with 35,720 votes, beating Caroline Woodley, the Labour incumbent, who got 26,685 votes.
In a speech conceding defeat, Woodley said:
To Zoe, you’ve shown great determination and resilience, and I know you have the support of the council to continue the good work we have done as a liberal administration …
To my Labour government, you’ve got a lot of work to do, but thank you for the investment in housing.
Updated
Reform UK gains Essex from Tories
Reform UK has won control of Essex county council from the Conservatives after securing at least 40 of the 78 seats up for election.
Zoë Garbett says she was elected Green mayor of Hackney because people desperate for alternative to 'failing Labour'
Lisa O’Carroll is a senior Guardian correspondent.
The Green party’s Zoë Garbett has been elected mayor of Hackney. She won with 35,720 votes, beating the incumbent mayor, Labour’s Caroline Woodley, by almost 10,000 votes.
It is the first time the Greens have won a mayoral election since directly-elected mayors were introduced.
In her victory speech, Garbett said she won because people were desperate for an alternative to the “failing Labour government”. She said:
Today, we start the fightback. In this election, over and over, people kept telling me that they felt let down. People kept saying, ‘it’s hard for me and it’s hard for us’. Council services are failing those who need them most and people are struggling to make ends meet …
Across London and the country, people have made it clear that they are desperate for an alternative to this failing Labour government. It is not old parties versus new parties, this is about a system of fear versus a movement of hope.
Garbett also said that affording housing and reducing child poverty would be priorities.
This administration is yours because the people of Hackney own Hackney and it’s time to take it back.
That’s why one of my first acts will be to do a full investigation into who owns Hackney, its buildings, its land, to begin getting these spaces back to the communities who desperately need them.
Our plan is about getting the basics right and making day to day easier, getting repairs done quickly, making food and energy cheaper, and rooting out racism in our schools.
I’ll fight the system that views housing as a way of making money, rather than a universal right for every single person.
I’ll get more council houses from development. The people need somewhere affordable to stay.
And I won’t be silent about the government decisions that are harming Hackney residents like continued austerity. It is both heart-wrenching and outrageous that here’s something like one in two children in Hackney live in poverty.
Every day I will work to fix this. Poverty isn’t a fact, it’s a political choice, and Hackney says no.
Pound and UK bonds stronger after Starmer pledges to stay on as PM
Government bonds rallied after Keir Starmer vowed to stay on despite heavy losses for Labour in the local elections, the Press Association reports.
Yields on long-dated government bonds, also known as gilts, dropped back to two-week lows, with 30-year gilt yields down 11 basis points to 5.54% and 10-year gilts seeing an eight basis point fall to 4.88%, PA says. Gilt yields move counter to the value of the bonds, meaning their prices rise when yields fall.
Graeme Wearden has more on this on his business live blog.
It is looking as if the Green party has won the Hackney mayoralty, Lisa O’Carroll reports. The result is coming in the next few minutes.
Former Labour chair Ian Lavery says Starmer could 'kill Labour' if he does not resign
Ian Lavery, a former Labour party chair and former national campaign coordinator, has told the BBC that Keir Starmer could destroy the Labour party if he does not stand down.
In an interview with Jonny Dymond for the World at One, Lavery said Stamer could “kill the Labour party” and that “the most effective thing that he could do would be to have an organised withdrawal from his leadership of the Labour party, and hence the prime minister”.
Lavery said the election results were an “utter disaster”. He went on:
I firmly believe, and I’m among many others in the party, that the party could cease to be in the immediate future …
We cannot have stability when we’re at 16% in the polls and witnessing annihilation.
He also said that, if Starmer did not resign, he thought there would be a leadership election in the “coming weeks”.
Lavery is a leftwinger who was a prominent Jeremy Corbyn supporter and – as with John McDonnell (see 7.22am) or Maryam Eslamdoust (see 10.37am) – No 10 will be able to argue that Lavery’s views come as no great surprise.
But the language is very strong.
Labour blames 'strong mood for change' as it prepares for crushing defeat in Wales
Labour is heading for a crushing defeat in Wales after suffering disastrous local election results in England overnight, the Press Association reports. PA says:
The party has been the largest at country-wide elections in Wales for more than a century and had won the most seats in the Welsh Parliament since its creation more than two decades ago.
But after Wales went to the polls on Thursday, Labour is bracing itself for a brutal set of results in its former heartlands, with a senior figure admitting the party faced a “tough election campaign” under “difficult circumstances”.
In Wales, a Labour source indicated the party’s vote had collapsed in Blaenau Gwent Caerffili Rhymni and said it would be a “struggle” to hold on to one seat – out of a total of six – in the constituency, which includes some of its South Wales heartlands.
At the close of polls on Thursday, Huw Irranca-Davies, Welsh Labour campaign chairman and deputy first minister said: “After many years in government in Wales, and with Labour now governing across the UK, there was always going to be a strong mood for change and frustration.
“The ongoing pressures people face from the cost of living are real and hurt deeply. We take that seriously. There were many tough messages heard on the doorstep.
“And in the days ahead, we will reflect carefully and listen with humility to what voters are telling us. There will be no dodging. No deflection. Just determination to put things right.”
A Plaid Cymru source said: “From what we have so far…. It’s looking good.”
The Labour vote has “collapsed”, they added.
Badenoch brushes aside Tory loses, claiming party is 'coming back'
Kemi Badenoch has claimed that the Conservatives are “coming back”.
That is quite a hard argument to make, given that they have lost more than 170 seats, according to the BBC tally. But this is how she made the case in a speech to activists in Westminster, where the Tories gained control of the council from Labour.
What did we say? We said Conservatives are coming back and here we are [in Westminster].
Just look at some of the great results that we have had up and down. Look at Harlow. People said that Reform was going to take all 11 seats in Harlow. How many did they did? Zero. How many did we get? 11.
We have done brilliantly in Westminster. We have taken back Wandsworth. People said nobody even expected anything to happen in Wandsworth. Wandsworth is now under Conservative control.
Look at Fareham where Reform said they were going to be marching through. Conservative hold. We were told we were going to be wiped out in Bexley. What happened in Bexley? Conservative hold. And our councillors there have actually increased their majorities? The Conservatives are coming back.
Lisa O’Carroll is a senior Guardian correspondent.
The borough of Hackney in London is expected to call the mayoral result in the next hour with the incumbent Labour mayor Caroline Woodley fighting to remain in power against the Green’s Zoë Garbett.
Hackney is one of the Green’s key targets with polling sugesting they could unseat Labour at a mayoral level and see a surge in council seats potentially ending Labour power in the borough.
Zack Polanski, the Green leader, is expected here in Hackney after the speeches.
Updated
This is from the political commentator Sam Freedman on Bluesky on the results so far.
Based on the overnight results Labour are going to do at the lower end of expectations outside of London. Reform will sweep NE, W mids etc...
Their salvation might be Green underperformance vs polls in London. But we need to see some results from inner-London councils to confirm that.
This prompted this reply from Jim Waterson, who writes the London Centric Substack.
Greens in London not fighting that underperformance narrative atm, seem a bit disappointed, last week hit hard.
Waterson and Freedman collaborated on a very good guide to the electoral contest in London.
This is from Emma Volney from ITV Anglia, who interviewed a Reform UK councillor last night who accidentally said he was representing Ukip. Nigel Farage actually left Ukip some years ago and set up a new party (the Brexit party, renamed Reform UK), but many people view Reform as continuity Ukip – including, it seems, this chap.
Former PLP chair Dave Watts says Starmer should stand aside and let Burnham take over
Dave Watts, a Labour peer and who served as whip in the Commons under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has written an article for HuffPost UK saying that Keir Starmer should stand aside to allow Andy Burnham to replace him as Labour leader and PM. Watts, who was also chair of the PLP, says:
The leadership question must be confronted head-on and without further delay. Does Keir Starmer possess the qualities required to steer the country through these turbulent times and reconnect with a disillusioned electorate? On the evidence of Thursday’s results, the answer is no.
It’s clear we need a change, and many MPs and Labour voters are looking to the most successful and popular Labour politician, Andy Burnham, to provide that change.
I believe that Andy should be allowed to stand in a by-election to boost Labour’s prospects and to provide the leadership needed.
TSSA union general secretary says Labour facing disaster, like Democrats under Biden, unless Starmer goes
Maryam Eslamdoust, general secretary of the TSSA transport union, has said Keir Starmer should resign. In a statement she said:
Unions like the TSSA will not stand by in the wake of this electoral disaster and let Keir Starmer pave the way for a hard right government led by Nigel Farage.
Joe Biden did exactly that in the US, and it’s clear from these results that we’re facing a similar catastrophe unless Labour changes leadership and direction.
The TSSA will now seek to work with other unions to assert our political influence at all levels of the Labour party to try to deliver that.
At the last general election, the country didn’t vote simply to repaint the front bench red. People voted for meaningful change they could actually feel in their lives.
That’s why Labour urgently needs a leadership election to allow members to pick a candidate who is much more responsive to the needs of working people and who can stop the very real danger of a far-right government coming to power in this country.
The TSSA is one of the smaller unions affiliated to Labour and Eslamdoust has never been a Starmer fan, and so her comments are not that surprising. But Starmer will be worried about other union leaders saying the same. Earlier this week Steve Wright, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, said a leadership contest after the elections was inevitable.
Tories lose control of Hampshire
The Conservatives have lost control of Hampshire, which now has no overall majority, the Press Association reports. With 77 of 78 seats counted, the Conservatives have won 27, with the Lib Dems winning 26 and Reform UK 19, PA says. It means no party has reached the 40 seats needed for a majority.
Sky News has a report saying some Labour MPs are saying Keir Starmer should announce a timetable for his departure so that Andy Burnham can return to the Commons. The report quotes five sources (all MPs, it implies) saying this. But all of them are quoted anonymously, which suggests the Starmer critics (or many of them) are unwilling to go public in their calls for his departure.
Davey claims results show only Lib Dems can stand up to Reform UK
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is claiming that the results show his party is the only one strong enough to stand up to Reform UK. He said:
I am so proud of the thousands of Liberal Democrat campaigners who have fought hard to hold off Reform and keep their divisive politics out of our communities.
We have shown we can take on Nigel Farage and win, taking control of Portsmouth and Stockport despite Reform throwing everything they had at these elections.
Labour and the Conservatives are facing extinction level losses because people are rightly fed up with the appalling mess they have made of the country.
The Liberal Democrats are now the only party strong enough to stand up to the populist extremes and protect our country from chaos. We will be the raillying point for all those who believe in building things up, not burning them down.
Davey was in Portsmouth, where the Lib Dems gained control of the council. (See 3.58pm.)
According to the BBC, turnout in the English local elections was 43% – up 8 percentage points on 2025. That looks like a historic high for local elections in years where people are not also voting in a general election.
Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, is being interviewed on the BBC. Despite being asked repeatedly whether Labour should let Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, stand for election to parliamentary, she repeatedly refused to give an answer. Burnham was a talented politician, and a friend, but this was a matter for the national executive committee, she said.
Peter Kellner, the elections expert and former YouGov president, has posted a good analysis of the results so far on his Substack blog. It is well worth reading in full, but here’s an extract.
Behind the impressive tally of Reform’s gains – likely to end up well over 1,000 – Nigel Farage should be privately worried. In last year’s local elections Reform won 41 per cent of all seats contested across England. On the basis of the overnight figures, this year’s tally is around 33 per cent. If there were no polls, and there had been no elections last year, this year’s figure would be astonishing. But we do have the record of recent polls and elections, and it seems clear that Reform has peaked …
In contrast to Reform, Labour has cause for relief, despite losing half the seats it was defending yesterday. It’s bad – and in normal times it would be catastrophic – but it’s not as bad as its record in local council by-elections over the past 12 months, where it hast lost three-quarters of the seats it was defending …
However, even on the most optimistic interpretation of Labour’s performance, the overnight figures contain a stark warning. John Curtice told BBC viewers in the early hours that while Labour has lost many SEATS to Reform, it has lost VOTES more to the Greens.
Jonathan Bartley, a former Green party co-leader and a party candidate in Lambeth, told Times Radio this morning that he expected the party to do very well as results come in today. He said:
I think we’re going to break records today. We’ve already made net gains right around the country. We are positioned very much as the antidote to Reform. I think we’re going to make a breakthrough on the Senedd, in the Welsh parliament, today.
Starmer says he intends to lead Labour into next election
In her final question, Sky’s Beth Rigby told Keir Starmer that a member of his “top team” had messaged her to say that Starmer was the problem for Labour and that if he stayed they risked handing the country to Reform UK.
Asked what he would say to people who thought that, Starmer replied:
What I say to that is we won a landslide victory in July 2024. I led our party to that victory. That is a five year mandate to change the country.
Yes, there are difficult conditions. The inheritance was terrible. The international context is very, very difficult. But we need to inject that hope and convince people that things can and will get better.
And that’s why in coming days, I’ll set out the further steps that we will take.
Asked if he would stand as PM at the next election, Starmer replied:
Yes. There’s a five-year term I was elected to do. I intend to see that through.
This question is significant because, while many Labour MPs do not want Starmer to resign now, there is a widespread view that he should not lead them into the next election.
(Rigby asked if Starmer would be Labour’s leader going into the next election. Starmer said yes, but in his fuller answer he just talked about serving a full five-year term. In truth, though, no prime minister can easily say they don’t intend to fight the next election, because as soon as they do, they lose all authority.)
Starmer says Ed Miliband supports him, dismissing claim Miliband suggested he should set out resignation timetable
Rigby also asked Starmer about the Times report claiming that Ed Miliband has privately urged him to set a timetable for his resignation.
Starmer replied:
I think Ed Miliband has dealt with this and made absolutely clear that he supports me.
That is not an absolute denial. Miliband has also dismissed the story, but without saying it is wholly unfounded. (See 00.27am.)
The Times report, by Steven Swinford, Patrick Maguire and Geraldine Scott, says:
Ed Miliband has privately suggested to Sir Keir Starmer that he should consider setting out a timeline for his departure amid concerns he will be forced out of No 10 in the wake of the election results, The Times has been told.
Two sources familiar with the discussion said that the energy secretary and former Labour leader made the suggestion during a private meeting with the prime minister about a fortnight ago …
[Miliband] is understood to have raised his concerns during a private discussion with Starmer during which the two men talked about potential options for the aftermath of the elections.
Miliband is supporting a return to Westminster for Burnham as the left-of-centre candidate best positioned to restore Labour’s fortunes. Starmer remains intent on blocking a Burnham comeback and has made clear that he will not set out a timeline for his departure.
Starmer rules out resigning, saying he won't 'walk away and plunge country into chaos'
Sky’s political editor, Beth Rigby, interviewed Keir Starmer after his short speech at Kingsdown methodist church in Ealing. (See 8.40am.)
Starmer said:
The voters have sent a message about the pace of change, how they want their lives improved. They was elected to meet those challenges. And I’m not going to walk away from those challenges and plunge the country into chaos.
Rigby put it to Starmer that the voters wanted to get rid of him. Starmer replied:
They’ve sent a message that the change that we promised isn’t being delivered in a way they can feel. And also, frankly, they’re fed up with years of the status quo. But we were elected to deal with those challenges, and I’m not going to walk away from that.
Rigby tried again, got much the same answer, and then she asked again: “To be clear, you are not going to resign?”
Starmer replied:
No, I’m not going to walk away and plunge the country into chaos. We were elected to deal with these challenges and that’s what we will do.
Farage took some questions after his short speech.
Asked what he would do for people who voted for the party, he said Reform UK now had a track record in local government. He said that it was keeping council tax lower than other parties.
And he said that the Institute for Fiscal Studies had backed up this claim.
Another reporter said that, since Farage was talking about council funding, he would like to talk about Farage’s own funding. He was referring to Farage taking an undisclosed £5m donation from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.
Farage shut that down. He said he would talk about than on any other day, but not today.
UPDATE: Here is video of Nigel Farage.
Updated
Farage says results mark 'historic shift' because Reform UK winning in Tory and Labour areas
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has been speaking in Havering.
He said he was delighted to be outside Havering town hall, “which is under new management”.
He said Labour were being “wiped out by Reform in many of their traditional areas”.
And later today we would see the Tories wiped out in some of their heartlands, he said.
He went on:
I think overall what has happened is a truly historic shift in British politics.
We’ve been so used to thinking about politics in terms of left and right, and yet what Reform are able to do is to win in areas that have always been Conservative. But equally, we’re proving in a big way we can win in areas that Labour have dominated, frankly, since the end of World War one.
At the moment, we’re winning one in three of all the seats that are up.
But I genuinely think the best is yet to come. I’m very excited about the north-east results, the Yorkshire results, some more to come in the West Midlands. [In] Essex we’re feeling supremely confident and that’s significant given that half of the shadow cabinet have seats in Essex. So it’s a big, big day.
Starmer says results 'very tough' for Labour, he takes responsibility, and party must 'reflect and respond'
Keir Starmer has said that the results for Labour have been “very tough”, that he takes responsibility, and that the party must “reflect and respond”.
Speaking at Kingsdown methodist church in Ealing, west London, he said:
The results are tough, they are very tough, and there’s no sugarcoating it.
We have lost brilliant Labour representatives across the country, these are people who put so much into their communities, so much into our party.
And that hurts, and it should hurt, and I take responsibility.
When voters send a message like this we must reflect and we must respond.
I think the vast majority of people do understand that we face huge challenges as a country.
We’ve had a series of economic shocks in recent years and there’s a very difficult international situation at present, they know that.
But they still want their lives to improve, they still want to see the change that we promised, they know the status quo is letting them down and they’re frustrated, they don’t feel the changes.
It is customary for leaders to issue statements like this after bad election losses. It may quash any claims that Starmer is in denial. But he did not say anything about how the party “must respond”. There are reports that he is planning a big speech that will address this next week.
This statement also confirms that Starmer has no intention of taking the advice of John McDonnell and others and announcing a timetable for his departure.
Reform UK gains Havering in London
Reform UK has gained control of Havering in London. It is the first time they have won control of a council in the capital.
Havering was under no overall control. It is a very unusual council. This is how Dave Hill and Lewis Baston describe it in their London Decides guide to the local elections.
The local politics of Havering are novel on a heroic scale, baffling to outsiders and probably to some insiders too. Seen in isolation, the 2022 result was quirky. Seen in historical context it was routine – a No Overall Control outcome with Conservative and Residents’ Association candidates taking the lion’s share of seats between them.
There was a difference, though: this time, the bulk of the Residents’ Association councillors agreed to work together as a Havering Residents’ Association (HRA) group and formed a partnership with Labour to run the council. Ray Morgon, a Residents’ Association councillor for 20 years, took the helm of this arrangement. It was undisturbed by the sole by-election in the borough since 2022, but lasted only until June 2024 …
The 55 Havering councillors [were aligned before this week’s election] as follows: HRA 25, up five since 2022; Conservatives 14, down seven; Labour eight, down one; East Havering Residents’ Group, three; Reform, three; Residents’ Association Independent Group, two. It still adds up to 55, but in a very different way from how things started. The Havering kaleidoscope will now be shaken up again.
Updated
In Hull Labour lost seven council seats. Reform UK gained 10 seats and the council, which had been Lib Dem, is now under no overall control.
Daren Hale, the Labour group leader on the council, told the BBC that it was “time for leadership change at the top”. He said Keir Starmer was not the right person to take the party forward.
Hale said:
What we were getting on every doorstep... was not about the Labour Party per se - certainly not about local councillors - it was about the leadership of the Labour party.
I’m afraid councillors up and down the land, in Hull tonight, have paid the price for that.
Keir Starmer needs to look at these results, reflect upon them and do the right thing and go.
Labour’s results are bad – but perhaps not as bad as feared. This is from Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham, quoting the lead psephologists used by the BBC and Sky News.
Very early days but John Curtice and Michael Thrasher both say Labour are so far performing less badly than expected
Curtice tells BBC: “Labour’s rate of seat loss were to continue to the end of tomorrow, they could be looking at losses of just over 1200 seats, rather less than some forecasts anticipated.
And Thrasher tells Sky he also forecasts about 1200 losses on current numbers (down from his previous 1800 forecast)
Long way to go until we get a fuller picture
So far it looks like Reform are the big winner - perhaps a reminder to some in the Labour Party who have said the Greens are their bigger threat
There is more from Curtice at 6.52am and from Thrasher at 6.16am.
James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary, has been the main Tory voice on the airwaves this morning. He said that, although his party had had a “tough night”, it had made some gains.
He said:
As predicted, it’s been a tough night for us, but we’ve made some real gains, against expectations.
I’ve just heard we’ve taken control of Westminster council. We held Fareham in Hampshire, Harlow in Essex, Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, and so we have got real pockets of good news in what we always knew was going to be a tough night.
I think Labour have had a disastrous night, and we can see why, with the terrible situation they’ve created at a national level.
This is from Luke Tryl, the More in Common pollster, on the election campaign in Angela Rayner’s constituency.
Over the last year or so pollsters have argued that the main changing in voting behaviour is because of switches within the right bloc (Tories moving to Reform UK) or within the left bloc (Labour supporters, or Lib Dems, moving to the Greens), and that the balance between the two blocs is relatively stable.
Tryl says these results challenge that theory.
In both cases this isn’t just Labour splitting on the left and the Tories eating Reform, though that’s part of the story. The right bloc is growing through some combination of Labour defections and differential turnout
And this is from the politics professor Ben Ansell on the same theme.
We will know much more about [intra-] and inter-bloc switching over the course of the day. But ultimately if you are losing in both directions it’s because people think you are crap. Pivoting one way or another won’t help you if the total consensus is you’ve stuffed it.
Starmer 'can still turn it round' for Labour, John Healey claims
John Healey, the defence secretary, is doing an interview round for the government this morning. Speaking on Times Radio, he said Keir Starmer could still “turn it round”.
He said:
Keir Starmer won the mandate for five years from the public. We’re not even halfway through that parliament. I think he can still deliver, he can still turn it round.
Asked if Starmer was the right person to lead the change, Healey said he was. He went on:
I’m not dismissing how bad these results look set to be, but we have had difficult nights before, and we have worked our way back.
West Midlands mayor Richard Parker says Labour needs 'serious reset', claiming it's possible with Starmer staying leader
On the Today programme Richard Parker, the Labour West Midlands mayor, has just been interviewed. Asked what his advice would be for Keir Starmer in the light of these results, he replied:
I’m a serious politician. The prime minister is too. We need to reflect on the results. That will take a bit of time, but … we do need a serious, meaningful material reset. We need to ensure that the great work we’re doing has a real resonance and is really tangible, making a real, tangible difference to people in our communities.
With a reset, Labour could recover and win the next election, he claimed.
When pressed whether that could happen with Starmer still as leader, Parker said yes – provided there was “a reset and a refocus”.
Updated
Karl Turner, who was elected as a Labour MP but who is currently suspended, has told Sky News that Keir Starmer’s unpopularity has been a significant reason for Labour losing seats. He said:
I mean it sincerely: Keir Starmer is more toxic on the doorstep in East Hull than Jeremy Corbyn ever was …
You can’t really say there’s nothing to see here ... There’s got to be significant change in my view.
John McDonnell says debate about Labour leadership 'inevitable' and suggests PM should set timetable for going
So far John McDonnell, the leftwinger who was shadow chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn, is the most senior figure in the party to say publicly that Keir Starmer should consider standing down in the light of these results. In an interview with Times Radio, he said that a discussion about the leadership in the party was now “inevitable”. He said he did not want to see Keir Starmer ousted in a coup. But he said that, if there was going to be change, there should be “an orderly transition” over a period of months. And he said Starmer himself might accept that was a good idea.
McDonnell has never been a Starmer fan, and he had the whip suspended for many months over a rebel vote in 2024. If by the end of the day he is still the most senior figure calling for Starmer to go, then the PM will probably be safe, at least for the next few months. At one point No 10 were worried about ministerial resignations.
Jonathan Brash, the Labour MP for Hartlepool, has also said Starmer should resign. But that’s not new; he has said that before.
The Times report claiming that Ed Miliband has privately urged Starmer to consider a timetable for his resignation does potentially undermine the PM’s authority. (See 00.27am.) But, without fully denying it, a spokesperson for Miliband has said they “do not accept this account”.
Updated
Right on cue, the Conservatives are (as predicted – see 7.03am) making much of the result in Westminster. A Conservative spokesperson said:
We are delighted the Conservatives have taken control of Westminster council. Labour are set to have a terrible night in London, an area they swept in the last general election.
Under Kemi Badenoch, the Conservatives are coming back in London. This victory is a clear sign of the progress the Conservatives are making under new leadership.
Tories gain Westminster from Labour
The Conservatives have gained Westminster from Labour.
In 1990, when the Conservatives had a dreadful night in local elections when Margaret Thatcher was in the last year of her premiership, Ken Baker, the party chair, famously managed to persuade much of the media that in fact they had done very well because they had won in Westminster and Wandsworth. Today they may be trying something similar.
This is from the More in Common pollster Luke Tryl.
Tories doing well in Wandsworth, Westminster and could doing better at holding off the Reform threat in Bexley than anticipated means that on an otherwise bleak night London maybe the Conservatives bright spot, which isn’t something you’d normally say.
The Liberal Democrats won 51 of the 55 council seats on Sutton council. (See 5.42am.) The Conservatives lost all 20 of their councillors. A Lib Dem source said:
This is a catastrophic result for Kemi Badenoch and a brilliant night for the Liberal Democrats. She promised to change the Conservative Party, instead they are facing a total wipeout.
Reform UK has taken from Tories 'get Brexit done' Boris Johnson voters from 2019, John Curtice says
On the Today programme Prof John Curtice, the elections expert who is in charge of the BBC’s results analysis, has just given his take on the results so far. Here are the main points.
Curtice said that Reform UK is winning at least a third of the seats declared so far.
He said Reform is doing particularly well in the places that backed Brexit. He said:
Essentially, Reform have taken from the Conservative party the coalition of people who voted for Boris Johnson to get Brexit done in 2019.
He said that the Conservatives, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens “are all typically running at around 15 to 20% in terms of their share of their votes”. There was not much between them, he said.
He said the Conservatives were down 12 points on their vote in 2022.
Reform UK gains Newcastle-under-Lyme
Reform UK has taken control of Newcastle-under-Lyme from the Conservatives.
Reform UK has gained its first council of this year’s local elections, taking Newcastle-under-Lyme from the Conservatives. Although it has already racked up more than 300 seats according to the BBC/Sky news counts, this is the first council it has gained.
In many councils, only a third of seats up for election this year. And Reform UK is starting from a very low base, because four years ago its support was marginal, and so in many areas it has been mathematically impossible for them to win control of the council.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has claimed that the results so far show that a “historic change in British politics” is underway. He claimed there “there is no more left-right” because Reform is “scoring stunning percentages in traditional old Labour areas”.
He went on:
If we cleared Becher’s Brook and landed well, we go on to win the Grand National. What is very clear to me is that our voters will stick with us now all the way through.
Here is a chart from Luke Tryl, the More in Common pollster, showing that the Green party is doing particularly well in areas where there are lots of students.
Labour loses control of Southampton
Labour has lost control of Southampton, the Press Association reports. It is the seventh council so far where Labour has lost majority control.
Labour remains the largest party on the council with 24 seats, two short of a majority, while Reform has eight, the Liberal Democrats have seven, and the Conservatives and Greens both have six, PA says.
The Liberal Democrats have just issued a statement saying they are on a record-breaking streak. Daisy Cooper, the party’s deputy leader, says:
The Liberal Democrats are on a record-breaking winning streak. We are heading for our eighth set of local election gains in a row and are on track to beat Labour and the Conservatives once again …
We’ve recorded stonking results in Stockport and Portsmouth, taking control of both councils and beating Reform. Many of our best results are still to come in places like Surrey, Sussex, Huntingdonshire, and Southwark.
Updated
Good morning. I’m Andrew Sparrow, taking over from Hamish Mackay.
Most of the English councils are counting today, and Scotland and Wales also don’t start counting until this morning.
Trying to assess the results so far, I’ve been re-reading what Michael Thrasher, the local elections expert and Sky News pundit, said on Wednesday in an article about how to assess the early results. He said:
Forty-six of the 136 English councils declare overnight. These account for more than 1,200 seats, a quarter of the total, sufficient to give a picture of the winners and losers. Labour defends over 500 of these seats, 43% of the total.
If the seat tally by breakfast shows a net loss of 200 seats, that is better than expected. If we factor in another 100 losses, Labour has lost 60% of its seats - bad, but not yet a disaster.
If, by sunrise, Sky News’ tracker edges towards minus 350 seats and beyond, then expect increased speculation about the occupant of Downing Street.
The Sky News tracker has Labour having already lost 239 seats. (The Guardian’s has a slightly different figure but, as Hamish explained earlier, we use PA data and the figures don’t always match up. That is because PA waits until all seat results from a council are in before adding those figures to their total.)
So, it’s looking bad for Labour but – according to the Sky benchmark – it could be worse.
Updated
To all who’ve been reading overnight, thanks for joining. My colleague Andrew Sparrow is now taking over and I’ll be heading to bed to pick up my phone and carry on reading this blog.
Updated
Labour loses control of Wandsworth, holds Merton
In what was an incredibly tight contest, Labour has lost control of Wandsworth in south west London. The Tories picked up eight seats to push the council into no overall control.
In slightly better news for Labour, though, they did manage to hold on to nearby Merton.
UPDATE: Commenting on the result, a Conservative spokesperson said:
We are very pleased to have become the largest party in Wandsworth, and after conversations we are confident that we will run the council.
This is yet another former Labour council where residents have seen that only the Conservative party, under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, have the serious plans needed for London and for the country, and the team to deliver it.
Updated
Pollster John Curtice says that while Reform UK is clearly ahead it has “probably not” reached 30% of the vote, underlining “the fracturing of British politics”.
He told the BBC:
It may well be now that Labour lose rather less than the 1,500 seats that perhaps some people said was potentially the tipping point for attempts to unseat Keir Starmer.
He added:
There is still a very long way to go and certainly what one has to say is this: the big picture is Reform are ahead.
It’s clear that Reform are so far winning most votes in the elections that have been declared so far, in much the same way as they were in last year’s council elections.
And they are basically being trailed by four parties that are all of them just a little bit below 20% or so, somewhere between 15 and 20%, but are actually at the moment quite difficult to disentangle.
But none of the parties are very big, let’s make that clear. Even Reform are probably not quite at 30% of the vote, so the fracturing of British politics is underlined by these results and confirmed by them.
Labour holds Hammersmith and Fulham
I mentioned earlier Labour’s confidence in Hammersmith and Fulham, and that seems to have been well placed.
Labour picked up one seat to increase its majority over the Tories.
Meanwhile in Sutton – another area where all seats were being contested – the Lib Dems have massively increased their majority.
Updated
What's happened overnight?
If you’re just joining us, here’s a summary of developments so far:
Results in English council elections have been coming in since midnight, though counting is yet to begin in Scotland and Wales.
In England, Labour has lost control of five councils – Hartlepool, Redditch, Tamworth, Exeter and Tameside – and, overall, shed more than 150 seats so far.
In Hartlepool, the local Labour MP told the Guardian it was time for Starmer to step down.
Reform UK has seen surges around the country, picking up more than 225 council seats overall so far – though the party is yet to gain overall control of a council, in part because in many areas only a third of seats were being contested.
The Greens have seen their vote share increase since 2022, but have struggled to turn that into significant seat gains. Professor John Curtice said they were suffering due to first past the post.
The Liberal Democrats have gained Stockport and Portsmouth, while now holding every single council seat in Richmond. However, they lost control of Hull.
The Conservatives have lost more than 50 seats overall.
It’s been a tough night for Labour, though party sources insist they are hopeful over results in Merton, Hammersmith and Fulham and Ealing.
They also point to Labour holds in Lincoln and Reading, which Reform and the Greens respectively had been expected to do slightly better in.
Jamie Grierson is at the count in Oxford
In Oxford City Council, Labour lost two seats to the Greens but is expected to continue to be the biggest party and maintain its minority administration after winning in 10 wards.
The Greens gained three seats overall after winning nine wards.
Updated
Labour holds Reading
Labour has held Reading, where a third of the seats were up for election.
The Greens took three seats, while Labour lost three, but that wasn’t enough to have a significant impact on their majority.
A potential leadership change must be “on the agenda” if Labour has “nightmare” local, Senedd and Holyrood elections, Labour MP John McDonnell said.
Asked whether he believed Starmer had to go, the former shadow chancellor told the Press Association:
We will have to see when results are in and Wales and Scotland results may be more influential than council seats in England in shaping the party’s attitude to the future.
If it is the nightmare as we are worried it will be, then there should be no precipitous coup.
He added:
The party needs to consider why we are in this situation and that discussion should be at all levels of the party and consider all the issues, including why there have been so many policy mistakes alienating our support, but the leadership question has inevitably to be on the agenda. If there is to be a leadership change, it has to be an orderly transition, not a coup.
Lib Dems take every Richmond seat
You’d be hard pressed to find a part of the UK where voters seem as politically aligned as Richmond, where the Lib Dems have just increased their majority.
They now hold all 54 seats after the Greens lost five.
Richmond is the first council of the night to declare where every seat was being contested.
Updated
What's the wider picture so far?
On the BBC, John Curtice says there is a “pretty clear broad picture emerging, and it’s one that helps to explain much of the puzzles of gains and losses”.
Basically, Reform are ahead. However you look at it, Reform are clearly in pole position. In truth it looks as though…they’re well ahead of any of their opponents.
Their four other opponents are all seemingly not that dissimilar from each other in terms of the kind of shares of the vote they are getting.
He adds:
Reform are ahead (with a) relatively evenly spread vote under first past the post – that helps to explain why Reform are currently bringing in about 45% of the seats that have so far been declared.
But equally it also helps to explain why Conservatives and Labour are losing seats at a scale that is towards the higher end of what they feared.
It also helps to explain while the Greens are getting lots of credible performances, they’re not gaining that much in the way of seats because the truth is they are suffering the problem that many second and third parties suffer, which is under first past the post, you lose out. The Greens are just not doing well enough to be able to turn an eight-point lead in their support (compared to 2022) to gains in seats in any substantial number.
Updated
Labour loses control of Tameside after swing to Reform
There’s been a big swing in Tameside, which had been under Labour control. Reform has gained 18 seats, while Labour has lost 14 – meaning they have lost control of the council.
In Bolton, Reform has again made significant gains but the council remains under no overall control.
With results available from 21 out of 136 councils, Labour has now lost Tameside, Tamworth, Hartlepool, Redditch and Exeter.
It has lost 125 seats with Reform gaining 163.
Updated
We have two more results from councils where the Lib Dems are the largest party.
In Brentwood, Reform gained seven seats but the Lib Dems remain the largest party.
In Hull, Ed Davey’s party have lost their majority but remain the largest party.
Jamie Grierson is at the count in Oxford
The scale of the electoral challenge facing Labour is being laid bare as the party haemorrhages councillors and Reform makes significant gains.
Keir Starmer’s party went into Thursday’s local elections expected to lose up to 1,850 councillors, with senior figures describing the contest as “tough”.
Initial results are painting a bleak picture for the prime minister, with Labour losing councillors in its traditional northern heartlands.
Updated
Greens leader Zack Polanski said Starmer should “listen to the people and go” after dire poor local elections results for Labour.
Polanski said the Greens felt bullish about their prospects in London boroughs to be counted later today.
These first Green gains confirm what I’ve heard as I criss-crossed England and Wales during the campaign.
Voters are backing the only party taking the cost-of-living crisis seriously. We are the only party with real plans to cut bills, reduce rents and provide genuinely affordable homes.
I’ve made it clear that we are here not just to be disappointed by Labour, but to replace them. These early results indicate that voters want to see that change too. That is why Keir Starmer has to listen to the people and go.
Lib Dems gain Portsmouth, Tories hold Harlow
First Stockport, now Portsmouth – the Lib Dems have gained control of their second council of the night.
In Harlow, the Tories added to their majority after gaining five seats from Labour.
The Liberal Democrats said of the Portsmouth result:
This is a stonking success for the Liberal Democrats in Portsmouth. We’ve held our ground and grown, despite Reform throwing everything they had at this campaign.
Across the city, many voters have given short shrift to Farage – someone who chooses to side with Donald Trump even when he disparages our Royal Navy.
Updated
Results in Exeter, North East Lincolnshire
Results are landing quickly now. In North East Lincolnshire, which had a third of its seats up, Reform have gone from one to 14 seats – but the council remains under no overall control.
In Exeter, meanwhile, Labour lost four seats and lost control of the council.
Updated
On the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg has asked a wide selection of her guests from different parties what they experienced campaigning on the doorstep in the run-up to these elections.
As expected, there is some deviation in their messaging. There is, however, one factor that comes up repeatedly, and that is as strong dislike for Keir Starmer.
The former Conservative activist and now Reform UK backer Tim Montgomerie is the latest to be asked. He says:
The antagonism towards Keir Starmer on the doorstep actually upset me at times. The vehemence of it, the personal nature of it, I’ve been quite struck by. No-one in politics quite deserves the anger that is directed towards the prime minister.
Reform gains councillors in Chorley and Southend-on-Sea
Reform has made gains in both Chorley and Southend-on-Sea, though there is no overall change to control of either council.
The Press Association, which is providing the data for our results tracker, says that after 10 fully declared council results, Labour has won only 17% of the seats it was defending.
Reform has so far won 56% of the seats it was contesting, it adds.
Labour holds Salford and Lincoln
Labour has managed to retain control of Lincoln council, which Reform had been heavily targeting. Farage’s party took four seats tonight – they also won the mayoralty last year – but it wasn’t enough to completely erode Labour’s majority.
In Salford, Reform gained 13 seats but again Labour retain control of the council, which had a third of its seats up for grabs.
Results exceeding Reform's expectations, says Farage
Nigel Farage has told reporters at the party’s Millbank headquarters that the results so far have exceeded his expectations.
I think what you’re witnessing is an historic change in British politics. Forget left-right, there is no more left-right. It is gone, it is out of the window, it’s finished.
As you can see, we are scoring stunning percentages in traditional old Labour areas. We’re currently averaging about 39% of the vote, of the seats that are in already, we’re currently on 145 seats won.
We are way exceeding anything that I thought.
He added:
What you’ll see tomorrow is the same pattern repeated across the south when we win Essex by an extraordinary margin and Norfolk by an extraordinary margin.
Lib Dems win control of Stockport
Stockport council, which was previously under no overall control, has been taken by the Liberal Democrats after they gained three seats.
A total of 21 out of 63 seats were up for grabs.
Responding to the win, a party spokesperson said:
This is a great result and shows that Liberal Democrat teams can win right across the country.
Our hardworking local team has held off the rise of Reform – while others sought to sow division and chaos, we focused on the issues that matter.
Updated
Labour loses 20 seats in Wigan - but retains control of council
Labour has retained overall control of Wigan council, though there is little cause for cheer for them. Only a third of the seats were up for election and they lost 20 of those.
Updated
Conservative MP Lewis Cocking has welcomed a “fantastic set of results” for his party in Broxbourne. Ten out of 30 seats on the council were up for election in the Hertfordshire borough.
The Conservatives suffered a loss to Reform UK, but ultimately won seven seats and have retained control of the authority. Reform UK won two seats and Labour one.
Cocking, who previously led Broxbourne Council, told the Press Association he was “really over the moon”.
We’ve had a fantastic set of results in Broxbourne. I’m really sad we didn’t get three of our candidates over the line.
No change in Hart or Peterborough
In Hart, the council remains under no overall control after Reform took just one seat from the Tories. The Lib Dems remain the largest party.
There is also no overall change in Peterborough.
Updated
Labour loses Tamworth, Conservatives hold Broxbourne
More bad news for Labour, which has lost control of Tamworth council after Reform gained nine seats. No party has majority in Tamworth.
In Broxbourne, a true Conservative stronghold, the Tories have retained control.
Mark Brown is at the Hartlepool council count.
The turnout in Hartlepool was 31.5%, slightly higher than the 28% of the last local election in 2024.
The council has a volatile leadership history with Labour, the Conservatives, Independents and the Brexit Party all having spells in charge in recent decades.
This time the Conservatives were defending two seats, losing both of them to Reform.
In 2021, losing the Hartlepool by-election to the Conservatives made Starmer seriously consider resigning as Labour leader. He saw it as a “personal rejection” but was persuaded not to act hastily.
Could Hartlepool and the wider results in the north east have Starmer once again considering his future? Is Hartlepool setting the north east narrative?
Reform took County Durham last year and is confident of taking Sunderland, which has been Labour since the council was established in its current form in 1973. That important declaration is expected around 4pm.
Reform also hopes to take Gateshead (4pm) and South Tyneside (5.30pm). In Newcastle, the Greens are confident of making significant gains.
Hartlepool MP calls for Starmer to step down as PM after council results
Mark Brown is at the Hartlepool council count.
Reform are the runaway winners in what could be a catastrophic day for Labour in north east England.
There were 12 seats up for grabs in Hartlepool and Reform won every single one of them. It means Labour, which had a slim majority and was defending six seats, is likely to become the opposition.
Because only a third of the council was being elected, Reform do not have an outright majority. The party will have to make deals with independents in order to take control.
Labour councillors and supporters were noticeably despondent at the count in Brierton sports centre. They knew what was coming. Heavy defeat was in the air.
The town’s Labour MP Jonathan Brash watched his wife Pamela Hargreaves, leader of Hartlepool council, lose her seat.
He told the Guardian he was angry and he repeated his call for Keir Starmer to go.
It has been a terrible night for the Labour party. What I’ve seen here is extraordinarily good, hard-working, Hartlepool people lose their seats. I’ve seen canvassers working night and day in this election and it’s all been for naught and the reason has absolutely nothing to do with them.
They are delivering for this town, they have been delivering for this town and the reality is we need change at the top of the Labour party.
I think the very best thing the prime minister could do now is address the nation tomorrow and set out a timetable for his departure. We can then have an orderly transition, one that, by the way, ensures the full breadth of talent within the Labour party is able to stand, should it want to.
Brash said that was not him backing Andy Burnham – “I don’t know who’s going to put their name forward” – but it was “disgraceful” that the Greater Manchester mayor was blocked from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election.
He hopes Starmer will go but it was about more than that, he said.
We need bolder policies to actually fix the foundations of our country. We’ve got a huge majority for three years. There are things that we can do that are radical and different and really change the lives of people for the better. It’s time to stop the political cowardice on those big issues and actually go for it and make those massive changes this country needs.
Brash said he expected Labour would now become the opposition in Hartlepool “and we will be holding Reform’s feet to the fire”.
Updated
Labour loses control of Hartlepool and Redditch
Two more council declarations, and it’s not good news for Labour.
In Hartlepool, Reform UK has gained 11 seats while Labour has lost six, meaning they have lost control of the council. There is now no party with overall control in Hartlepool.
In Redditch, meanwhile, Reform has taken eight seats from Labour, the Tories, the Greens and an independent. As with Hartlepool, Redditch has moved from Labour controlled to no overall control.
Reform UK are making gains in Wigan, taking six of the first seven results to be declared, with an independent taking the other seat.
However, the result will not affect control of the council as Labour began the night with 62 of the 75 seats, with only 25 seats being contested on the night.
The Press Association reports there were hugs and cheers at the Salford City Council count as Labour held the Eccles ward with 1,663 votes to Reform’s 1,207.
The Green Party claimed the Quays seat from the Liberal Democrats.
Halton held by Labour
Halton is the first full council to be declared. Labour lost 15 seats to Reform but retained control of the council as only a third of the seats were up for election.
Halton is home to the Runcorn and Helsby parliamentary seat, which Reform won from Labour by just six votes in a byelection last year.
See more here:
Updated
A bit more from John Curtice, who says results so far show Reform taking an average of about 28% of the vote.
That’s more or less in line with what you would expect given that’s where they are at the moment in the opinion polls.
We are also certainly seeing evidence of Labour’s vote falling away quite heavily, particularly in places where they were previously strong – on average down by 21 points on 2022.
Oh and by the way doing particularly badly in one ward which has a very substantial muslim population. And of course we know that in 2024, Labour’s vote fell very heavily in such places. Here is the first indication that that may well be replicated.
So far not quite so bad for the Conservatives, only down by five points. But it’s down five points on not a particularly good result back in 2022.
Too early to say too much about the Greens except basically, wherever they’re fighting, their vote is up. They’re putting in a credible performance but it’s kind of a good second or a good third.
Updated
The first seat at the Salford City Council election count has been taken from Labour by Reform.
In the Walkden North ward, Reform’s candidate Miles Henderson had 1,209 votes to Labour Jack Youd’s 953, with the Green party in third place with 427 votes.
Labour will remain in overall control of the council, whatever the result tonight, where 21 of the 60 seats are up for election.
Full results tracker
A reminder that you can find all the results from England, Scotland and Wales in our tracker:
You might notice, however, that our results appear slightly differently to others’. My colleagues who built the tracker have provided this explanation:
Our results are provided by the Press Association (PA). Numbers for change in seats are calculated against the state of the council or parliament just before this election. Other organisations calculate using the previous election, and this can lead to discrepancies. In Wales, the electoral system is sufficiently different to previous elections that comparison is not given.
Other outlets may also announce individual ward councillor results as they become known, while PA release results for each council only when its full count is complete. PA collates results only for elections that were due in this electoral cycle, meaning there may be council byelection results in other parts of the country that are not included. There are frequent changes in ward boundaries, sometimes accompanied by changes in the number of councillors overall. “Shadow elections” were also held for two new unitary authorities due to be created in Surrey in 2027.
Updated
Professor John Curtice, perhaps the UK’s best-known pollster, is on the BBC News channel now discussing what early results in England are showing us.
He says that polling prior to this election suggested this would be a difficult night for Labour and the Conservatives, with Reform UK and the Greens making significant gains.
He said:
There’s nothing so far in these early results to against that expectation.
Probably an awful lot of the councillors who get elected tonight will get elected on relatively low shares of the vote.
This is the product of the five-party politics and it will therefore sometimes mean that the person who gains a seat is not necessarily the party who’s made most progress since 2022.
Reform win in first results to be declared
Reform UK has won in one of the first results to be declared, with Philippa Nicholson winning in Brentwood’s Hutton South ward.
She won with 987 votes (41%), ahead of the Conservatives on 785 votes.
Reform also won a seat in Chorley, with Martin Topp securing 778 votes in Chorley East, ahead of Labour on 677.
Updated
Here are some more images from counts around England:
The Labour group leader in Harlow, which is expected to be one of the first councils in England to declare its local election result, has said he will “lose some really good councillors, some hard-working councillors, this evening”.
James Griggs told the Press Association that “there’ve been some mistakes” since Labour won the general election – and the Harlow constituency in Essex – almost two years ago.
He said:
It’s easy to focus on one mistake, or one or two mistakes, whatever they may be, and forget about the hundreds of really good bits of delivery from the manifesto from just two years ago.
A lot of the stuff will take a while to come through – it is taking time, there’s a lot of repairing to do after the damage of the 14 years in austerity.
Labour is defending five seats out of 11 up for election in the Harlow Council poll.
Ed Miliband dismisses story claiming he has privately told Starmer to consider timetable for his departure
On the front page of tomorrow’s Times newspaper is a story claiming that Ed Miliband has “privately suggested to Sir Keir Starmer that he should consider setting out a timeline for his departure”. A spokesperson for the secretary of state for energy and net zero said: “We do not accept this account.”
Asked about it on the BBC, David Lammy warns Labour MPs against playing “pass the parcel” by removing Starmer as PM.
I think Ed Miliband has said that he doesn’t recognise that.
But look, let’s be clear, Keir Starmer won a mandate for five years to deliver for the British people, and now some people are suggesting that we should go away and play pass the parcel.
The Tories did that with leader after leader after leader.
He added:
Yes, there are questions that we have to answer, but there is no, there is no circumstances in which the answer to the questions that the British people are raising is to change the leader yet again.
That is not what is coming up on the doorstep. What they want is delivery. What they want is hope. What they want is change, and that’s what we’ve got to deliver.
Updated
Reform UK MP Richard Tice, who it’s rumoured could make an appearance at the count in Newcastle-under-Lyme, has just posted this on X:
Early positive vibes through the day being reinforced by early indicators as counting underway in some areas.
Huge thanks to all our amazing candidates, supporters and activists.
And massive thanks to the huge numbers who have voted Reform.
We are making history.
In the run-up to yesterday’s elections, candidates and political parties described a climate of abuse, including death threats and intimidation while campaigning.
Labour’s Dan Jarvis, the security minister, condemned “the rising tide of vile abuse, harassment and intimidation aimed towards elected officials and candidates” online and in person. “Anyone engaging in this sort of behaviour is directly attacking our democracy and we all must do more to stop it becoming normalised,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Green party said some candidates had received death threats or been “yelled at or chased down the street”, and some had withdrawn from campaigning in certain areas due to harassment.
“Anecdotally, this has been the worst year in memory,” the spokesperson said. They said the party had been “a focus at this election more than ever before”, with “some wildly false claims being made about the party and its representatives, which some members of the public have accepted on face value”.
Read more here:
We’re getting statements from some of the political parties now as we wait for results.
For the Conservatives, party chairman Kevin Hollinrake said:
We have run an energetic and positive campaign, showcasing that we have a clear plan to get Britain working again and that we have the team to deliver it... We know that so soon after a historic general election defeat and contesting wards won during the Party’s polling highs, that this will be a difficult set of elections for us. But we will continue to rebuild and to show the public that we have changed, to demonstrate that only this new Conservative party is a credible alternative.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said:
People are deeply disappointed with a Labour government that has been too timid to fix the country, but they are also appalled by the rise of Reform and Nigel Farage’s Trump-style politics. While those on the extremes of the right and the left want to burn everything down, Liberal Democrats want to fix what’s broken. Every Liberal Democrat local champion elected today will fight tirelessly for the communities they serve.
Green party leader Zack Polanski said:
I’ve travelled across England and Wales and I’m hearing the same everywhere I go – confidence that we will win more councillors than ever before. The news from the doorstep is that we will be taking seats from not just Labour but the Tories and Lib Dems too, from all across the country. Voters are responding to the fact that Greens are the only party taking the cost-of-living crisis seriously, with real plans to cut bills, reduce rents and provide genuinely affordable homes, as well as tackling the climate and nature crisis.
A Plaid Cymru spokesperson said:
Throughout this election, we have heard a clear appetite for change. People want a government that will stand up for Wales and focus relentlessly on the key issues affecting their lives. People have told us they have been inspired by Rhun ap Iorwerth’s leadership and driven by a desire for a positive alternative to Reform UK’s chaos and division.
Analysis: results set to have transformative impact on British politics
In case you missed it on Thursday, my colleague Andrew Sparrow wrote this excellent guide to why these elections could be so transformative for British politics:
We don’t have any results yet, but unless all the opinion polls, and all the council byelections that have taken place over the past 12 months, and all the parliamentary byelections that have taken place since the general election, turn out to be completely unreliable guides to how people vote today, then we already have a rough idea of what the outcome will look like. It will be enough to transform the political landscape of Britain – in at least seven ways.
1) The full arrival of five-party politics in England
Two-party politics has been in decline in British politics for more than half a century. Its high point was in 1951, when 97% of people who voted in the UK general election opted for either the Conservative party or Labour. In recognition of the Lib Dems, people used to talk about England having a two-and-a-half party system. Scotland and Wales have had strong nationalist parties for years, and Reform UK easily won the English local elections last year. Under Zack Polanski, the Greens have now been soaring in the polls and this is the first English election where talking about “main” parties and “minor” parties no longer makes sense. (How can it, when the “minor” parties with least parliamentary representation, Reform UK and the Greens, have been the two best-performing parties in some polls?) Those terms describe the parliamentary situation but not politics outside, where five parties are competitive across England and it is probably more useful to think in terms of legacy parties and disruptor parties.
2) Reform UK’s emergence as a GB-wide party
When Nigel Farage was leading Ukip, it looked like an English nationalist party. Scotland seemed to have a healthy resistance to Faragism and on one occasion, in 2013, he had to be locked in a pub in Edinburgh for his own protection. The Brexit party also never really succeeded in Scotland (although it did make inroads into Wales), but under its new name, Reform UK, it is competing with Plaid Cymru for first place in Wales, and with Labour for second place in Scotland. It should easily win the English locals, and so it is the only party with a realistic chance of coming first or second in England, in Scotland and in Wales. That is why Farage is boasting about his being the “only true national party”.
3) Wales going nationalist
Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, is widely expected to be the largest party in the Senedd after the elections and, unless Labour and Reform UK form some extraordinary version of their own Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Plaid will be the only party with a realistic chance of forming a government. Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid leader, would be the first non-Labour first minister of Wales since devolution. Assuming the SNP remain in power in Scotland (almost certain), and with Sinn Féin the largest party at Stormont, this would mean nationalists leading the three non-English nations in the UK.
This does not mean Welsh independence is on the cards. Although formally committed to independence, Plaid has never given any serious thought to how independence might be achieved and a government that tried to implement it would find it even more complicated and less popular than the project has been in Scotland, where independence was rejected in a referendum in 2014. But, after that vote, the Scottish parliament got new powers, and the Scottish government started to use them to diverge from UK government tax policy. The Welsh government has fewer devolved powers than its Edinburgh counterpart, but with Plaid in power in Cardiff over time that may change.
4) Labour support collapsing – especially in London
If Plaid win in Wales, it will be the first time Labour has lost a big election there for more than 100 years. It is also expected to lose big in London, where it is the dominant party in local government and where at the last election it won 59 of the 75 parliamentary seats. In fact, it is on course to do badly everywhere, recording its worst result since at least the 1970s. Here is the forecast from Britain Elects, who produce election forecasts for the New Statesman and who have a good record.
Tomorrow you may hear talk from Labour figures of the 1968 London elections. Taking place after devaluation the previous year, they were an utter disaster for Labour, which lost 17 of the 20 boroughs it controlled in the capital. They almost all went Tory. The upside for Labour people looking for a positive message out of this today is that the party recovered and, two years later, Harold Wilson called a general election that he thought he might win. But he lost. And Wilson did not have to contend with Reform UK, or the Greens, or five-party politics, or prolonged austerity, or social media, or any of the other factors that make Starmer’s situation different.
5) Local government getting more pluralist
Local government in Britain used to be dominated by the two biggest legacy parties, the Conservatives and Labour. That picture should take a considerable jolt this weekend. The Liberal Democrats think they will be at least the second largest party in local government by the time of the next election, in terms of councillor numbers, and perhaps even the biggest. And Reform UK and the Greens will have a signficantly bigger presence. This chart, from an excellent preview of the elections by Dylan Difford on Substack, shows how councillor numbers have changed over recent years.
And Open Council Data has full figures.
6) Failure of first past the post
It is increasingly clear that the election system used in UK parliamentary elections, and for local elections in England and Wales, does not work in five-party politics. It functions well for two-party politics, but in multi-party politics it can easily lead to a party winning a far larger proportion of the seats than it merits based on the proportion of the votes it won. This famously happened at the last general election when Labour won 34% of the vote but 63% of the seats. Less well known is how this is increasingly happening at local authority level too. Rob Ford has also written a terrific Substack guide to the elections, and he includes this chart showing how in some cases last year Reform was winning three-quarters of the seats on a council with less than half the votes. Ford says:
The crucial question for the Greens this year, as for Reform last year, is whether they can push their support in target areas above the ‘tipping point’ where first past the post goes from sandbag to springboard. For Reform last year, as the graph below illustrates, that tipping point came around 30% – in councils where Reform won above 30% they were generally over-represented in seats, often taking huge majorities.
The Guardian has an editorial today saying this system must change.
7) Labour’s fightback challenge
We don’t know yet how Labour will react to the results. Keir Starmer may face a leadership challenge. Even if he doesn’t, the party is going to have to come up with a response that goes beyond ‘Keep calm and carry on’. Elections function as transmission mechanisms; they deliver blunt messages to government and – unless the polls are 100% wrong – the message tonight will be that something needs to change.
So it will.
Updated
Here are some of the latest images from vote counts in England:
Updated
Meanwhile, as polls closed, deputy PM David Lammy said the elections had been “tough”.
He said:
I don’t want to sugarcoat it, the message from the doorstep is this is a tough election cycle.
This is a mid-term set of elections with people concerned about the cost of living and wanting to see the government go faster with quicker pace.
Lammy added that while Labour had run a “positive campaign”, the party’s “message of delivery” had been “drowned out by the politics of grievance”.
Lucy Powell, deputy Labour leader, added:
These elections are tough and took place in a difficult context. After over a decade of Britain being held back, working people up and down the country rightly want to see the whole of our United Kingdom firing on all cylinders in their interests. Labour has started to deliver on that promise and we are determined to make it happen everywhere for everyone.
Updated
Keir Starmer has thanked party activists after polls closed.
In a post on X, the prime minister said:
To all the Labour members and volunteers who have supported local campaigns across the country: thank you.Together we will build a stronger and fairer Britain.
These elections are widely seen as the biggest test for his premiership since the general election.
What to look out for in Scotland
Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent
Although the incumbent Scottish National party is cruising towards a gravity-defying fifth term in office, the fine detail of the results and the subsequent makeup of the Holyrood chamber remains exceptionally unpredictable.
Polls this week showed Reform UK, which has gained considerable momentum in Scotland over the past 18 months, was neck and neck for second place with Scottish Labour, whose rating have suffered from growing public dissatisfaction with the UK Labour government, despite its leader, Anas Sarwar, taking the career-defining decision to call for Starmer to stand aside in February.
Many constituency seats are in the balance, and the SNP is by no means guaranteed a majority. It could then turn to the Scottish Greens – who are anticipating a strong showing thanks in part to a Polanski bounce, although the Green Party of England and Wales is a separate entity – for support to create a pro-independence majority at Holyrood.
The SNP leader, John Swinney, has pledged to hold a vote seeking the powers to hold a second independence referendum on the first day of a new parliament – despite the fact that the UK government has consistently refused previous demands and he can offer no alternative route.
While the first full council result in England isn’t expected until 2am, there may be some smaller results from midnight.
I’ll bring you updates here, but to see the full results for England, Scotland and Wales you can head to our results tracker:
What to look out for in Wales
Bethan McKernan is the Guardian’s Wales correspondent
This week the Welsh parliament will grow from 60 to 96 members under a new, more proportional electoral system. Labour is expected to lose control of the Senedd for the first time since devolution in 1999, with Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth expected to become the new first minister, putting Welsh independence firmly on the agenda.
Coalition arithmetic makes it highly unlikely Reform will be able to form a government, even if it wins the most seats. If the numbers allow, Plaid Cymru will form a minority government without entering formal coalition agreements with Labour or the Green party.
Labour’s predicted losses are so catastrophic that some polls put the party in fourth place, after the Greens. Several polls suggest Eluned Morgan, the Labour first minister, will lose her seat.
The Senedd’s new list system has razor-sharp margins, making predictions very difficult. As little as 0.06% of the vote could decide the last (sixth) seat in each constituency, according to the pollsters More in Common.
Which results are we expecting first?
Aletha Adu is a Guardian political correspondent
The early hours of Friday morning will produce only a handful of declarations but they could shape the mood of the entire elections.
Hartlepool is one of the first major tests of whether Reform UK can convert polling momentum into real council gains. The declaration guide itself flags the possibility of Reform making significant advances there as one of the key storylines of the night.
If Reform performs strongly, Labour strategists will worry less about isolated local setbacks and more about the emergence of a durable anti-establishment challenger capable of eating into Labour’s old coalition in towns the party once considered safe.
Oxford could offer an early sign of how fragmented progressive and anti-Tory voters have become, with Labour, the Greens and Liberal Democrats all competing for similar voters. The declaration guide refers to “a mess of different liberal winners in Oxford”.
Dudley matters because it sits in politically volatile Midlands territory where Labour faces pressure from Reform amid frustration over immigration, living standards and distrust of Westminster politics.
You can see a full election results timeline here:
Polls closed in England, Scotland and Wales
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of election results in England, Scotland and Wales.
Thursday’s votes covered the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and 136 local councils in England, where 5,014 seats were contested, including every one on all of London’s 32 borough councils, more than a dozen borough councils, six unitary councils, six county councils and three district councils. A further 73 councils held elections for half or a third of the seats available.
There were also six mayoral contests – in Croydon, Hackney, Lewisham, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Watford.
So, there is a lot to come…
We’re expecting the first results in England between midnight and 2am, but counting in Scotland and Wales does not begin until around 9am – so those results are some way off.
As ever, we’ll bring you the latest news, colour and reaction throughout the night.
Feel free to get in touch – hamish.mackay@theguardian.com – if you spot any errors. My colleague Andrew Sparrow will take over at 6am, and comments will open from 8am.
Updated
