On 5 May voters in 124 councils across the country go to the polls to elect the councillors who will run their local authorities. These are the people who will make decisions about vital day-to-day issues such as care of older people, school places, child protection, waste collection, parking, parks and planning.
Voters in Bristol, Salford, London and, for the first time, Liverpool, will be choosing directly elected mayors to run their cities.
The voting takes place during momentous times for local government. Councils are implementing a new funding settlement that requires tough choices: they are moving towards a completely new finance model by 2020; they are working through the implications of new devolution settlements; at the same time, they are struggling to provide the daily services communities across the country rely on.
So these are crucial elections, and yet you would be hard-pressed to find out much about them. Voters may (or may not) have received polling cards, campaign leaflets through the letterbox, or even found aspiring councillors on their doorstep. But it’s difficult to find out about the bigger picture: how many seats are up for election, in which councils, and what this might mean for who controls the places where we live.
There isn’t even a single, easily accessible, “official” list of what elections are happening and where. At LGiU, the local democracy thinktank, we think that’s a problem.
Democracy works best when people have as much information as possible to help them make decisions and understand their potential consequences. That’s why we’ve teamed up with the Open Data Institute and Democracy Club to develop an election map, which we’ll be updating before, during and after the polls with the help of a network of count correspondents ( go to #outforthecount to find out more).
What the local elections will tell us
An interesting picture is already emerging. One of the standard laws of British political gravity is that governments suffer in local elections while oppositions prosper. Given divisions over Europe, Ian Duncan Smith’s resignation and a torrid week focused on the prime minister’s tax affairs, you might expect the government to be nervous. But on the face of things Labour has a lot more to lose than the Conservatives, with elections taking place in 58 Labour-controlled councils compared with 40 Conservative-controlled authorities.
And several of those look vulnerable: Labour has 12 councils with a third of seats up for election this year, where a swing of one to four seats would see it lose control. Bradford, Crawley, Redditch, Rossendale and Southampton need a swing of just two seats for Labour to lose overall control. If this happened Labour would remain the largest party – but without a majority.
If losses are anything like as bad as the 200 council seats party strategists are briefing, then any momentum built up on the back of the government’s recent difficulties could be lost.
But local elections don’t simply reflect national politics; they also help shape them. Labour councils are by and large more pragmatic and somewhere to the right of the national leadership. If Labour starts to lose these councils, a significant counterbalance will disappear. Similarly, the rebuilding of the Conservative party after the trauma of the EU referendum and a leadership contest sometime before 2020 will be significantly shaped by the councillors elected next month.
Most of all, of course, local elections are about the decisions people are making about their areas and their aspirations for them. The more we know about that the better.
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