The Electoral Commission’s new report on the 2026 English local government and mayoral elections provides largely positive picture of local democracy. Turnout was the highest seen at comparable local elections for a decade, public confidence in the electoral process remained strong, and the overwhelming majority of voters reported satisfaction with both registration and voting. At the same time, the report highlights several challenges that local authorities, elected members and policymakers will need to address if they are to further strengthen local democracy.
Perhaps the most striking finding is the increase in voter turnout. Participation reached 41.2% in metropolitan, London borough, unitary and district council elections and 45.2% in county council elections. The latter represents the highest county council turnout for three decades outside elections held alongside a general election or referendum. These figures suggest that local government increasingly matters to citizens and that many voters remain willing to engage when they feel local issues have real consequences for their communities.
The report also points to generally high levels of public confidence in election administration. Around 94% of voters were satisfied with the voting process. While 73% of eligible voters expressed confidence that the elections were well run, 9% were not satisfied – reasons for this include the perceived lack of useful information about candidates and/or parties, the voting system being seen as unfair, or the belief that the process of voting is not secure. Local authorities and electoral administrators should take credit for delivering elections effectively despite continuing operational pressures and resource constraints.
However, the report identifies several areas where citizen engagement could be improved. One concerns voter registration. Although most people were satisfied with the registration process, younger voters were less positive, and a significant proportion of dissatisfied respondents argued that registration should be automatic. The Electoral Commission reiterates its support for a consistent automated voter registration system and urges governments across the UK to coordinate reforms.
Accessibility is another continuing concern. Despite very significant efforts by returning officers to provide equipment and support in polling stations, disabled voters still face barriers to participation. Awareness of available assistance remains relatively low, even among people who could benefit from it. This finding highlights the importance of ongoing public communication and inclusive service design.
The report also raises important questions about information quality and democratic engagement. While awareness of the elections was high, many voters remained concerned about misinformation. More than half of respondents reported seeing misinformation during the campaign and around one in ten reported encountering deepfake material. Although the Commission’s pilot work found no evidence that political deepfakes were widespread, the findings underline growing risks associated with digital campaigning.
A major challenge concerns the experience of candidates. Abuse, intimidation and harassment, especially online, continue to affect many people standing for election. Candidates who were female, from an ethnic minority background, had a disability or were standing for Reform UK were more likely to experience abuse and intimidation. The report warns that these experiences are influencing how some individuals campaign, for example avoiding canvassing alone, and one third of respondents considered not standing for election because of harassment, intimidation or concerns about future abuse.
The report also highlights a wider issue for local democracy: the availability of reliable information about candidates and parties. Although large majorities found it easy to obtain information about voter ID requirements and voting methods, fewer found it easy to access information about candidates. This suggests that there remains a gap between procedural information and substantive information about political choices.
Finally, the report notes the pressures facing electoral administrators. Recruitment challenges, supplier issues and uncertainty surrounding potential electoral reforms all created difficulties for those delivering the elections. While these problems were largely managed successfully, councils and government need to address the long-term capacity and resilience of local electoral services. Effective citizen engagement ultimately depends on electoral systems that remain adequately resourced and capable of adapting to future reforms.
Overall, the 2026 elections offer grounds for cautious optimism. Higher turnout, strong voter satisfaction and confidence in election administration suggest that local democracy remains resilient. Yet the report also shows that participation cannot be taken for granted. Improving accessibility, modernising voter registration, combating misinformation and protecting candidates from abuse will all be central to sustaining citizen engagement and local democracy.
Between July and September 2026, I sent Freedom of Information requests to eighty-nine district, borough and city councils in England. Thirty-two went out in July; a further fifty-seven in August, adding questions about the annual electoral canvass. The full wording is in the appendix, and readers should judge it for themselves.
The questions were deliberately dull. How much did the council spend printing and posting correspondence to residents last year? How many items did it send? What did the canvass cost, and how did people respond to it?
As at 7 September 2026, seventy-three councils had replied. Thirty-six gave substantive answers. Twenty-one produced figures complete and consistent enough to compare with each other. Responses arriving after that date are not counted here. Excluding one council that restricts commercial re-use, the remaining twenty spent more than £4.4 million in a year on print and post alone. The median was £205,890.
Eighteen recorded both spend and volume. Divide one by the other and the cost of a single item runs from 74 pence to £15.01.
That spread is the first thing to be careful about, because it is not a finding about efficiency.
Councils count different things. Some totals include overheads, machine leases, paper and staff time; others are franking alone. Where a service is outsourced, the largest mailing may sit inside a contract price and never appear as postage at all. Shared services split costs between partners on conventions of their own. Year-on-year movements can reflect a restructure, a change of supplier, or a re-coded nominal ledger rather than anything operational. Geography, service mix and the degree of outsourcing all move the number. None of that is bad practice, and none of it can be read off a single figure.
What it does mean is that these figures are not comparable in the way a reader might assume, and that most councils cannot say which of those conventions their own number reflects.
Some answers, though, are not explained by accounting convention. A city council serving around 138,000 people replied that its total print and postage spend was “not held”, and that the number of items posted was “not held” as well. A district put its whole-council outgoing post at “£500k approx” and does not record how many items that buys. One council asked ten of its own departments and they disagreed with each other about whether the authority uses a digital notification platform.
A borough in the east of England explained that it had “recently wiped our 2025 canvassing data to commence canvassing for the current year”, rebuilt its answer from invoices and an Electoral Commission feedback sheet, and warned that it “may be incomplete.”
These councils answered courteously and within the deadline. The information was not there to give.
The canvass makes the point more precisely, because every authority is doing the same statutory job. Among four councils that answered in detail, one made no household visits at all; the others paid for 7,254, 8,839 and 12,306. Cost per property, where it could be isolated, clustered between 67 and 73 pence — a similarity that conceals four different operating models.
It also unsettles an assumption worth naming. In two of those councils about three-quarters of canvass responses arrived over the internet. In the third, which paid canvassers to call at the door, the internet share was 36 per cent and nearly half of all responses were collected in person. The digital share of responses appears to track the council’s chosen method rather than residents’ preferences. That is a caution for anyone reading channel-shift statistics as evidence of public appetite.
All of this now matters more than it did. Reorganisation will move these budgets into new and larger unitary authorities from April 2028. A successor authority inherits whatever its predecessors could measure. Where a district cannot state its own communication spend, the new organisation begins without a baseline for it; where a dozen districts each used a different convention, aggregating them produces a figure that is precise and meaningless.
Which raises a governance question rather than a spending one. Two councils told me, in different words, that nobody owns this. One wrote that it has “no officer responsible for customer contact strategy”. Another said all decisions on communications and digital engagement for the canvass are taken through the elections office. Correspondence with residents is not a service with a director. It is a cost distributed across every service, which is precisely why it falls between owners.
Three modest arrangements would help, and none requires new spending: a named officer accountable for the whole channel; a single nominal code that records volume alongside expenditure; and a canvass costed as one activity rather than split between an elections budget and a general print budget.
Reorganisation is an expensive way to find out what you were spending. It is also, for the next eighteen months, the cheapest moment to start counting.
Figure
“What one item costs, according to councils’ own figures.” Produced by the author from the FOI responses; councils anonymised. Copyright held by the author; free to reproduce with the article.
Eren Bahadir Pehlivan is the founder of ADORASEC Ltd, working on notification between institutions and the people they serve. The dataset here is his own. Email: [email protected]
Appendix — the Freedom of Information request
Reproduced in full, as sent. This is the wording used for the second round (fifty-seven councils, August 2026). The first round (thirty-two councils, July 2026) used the same Part A and Part C questions but did not include Part B, and asked for “the most recently completed financial year” rather than naming the period. That relative wording proved ambiguous: several councils answered without stating which year the figures covered, and their responses are excluded from the comparisons above. It was replaced with absolute dates for the second round. The change is noted here because it bears directly on how far the two rounds can be read together.
This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. I have tried to keep it as light as possible to answer, and I have set out below what would make it lighter still.
Please provide the following for the 2025/26 financial year only — that is, 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026.
If your figures for that period are not available, or if the council’s records are held to a different reporting period, please answer for whichever full year is most readily available and simply state in your response which period the figures cover. Knowing the period matters more to me than which year it is.
Four things before the questions, each intended to reduce the work involved.
First, we do not require a departmental breakdown. A single whole-organisation total is sufficient for every figure below. These figures are typically held against nominal codes in the finance ledger, and a total taken from there is exactly what we are asking for.
Second, if a figure is not separately recorded, please simply say so. That is a useful answer to us and we would much prefer it to an estimate. A number of authorities have already told us that certain figures are not held, and we have recorded that as a finding rather than a failure.
Third, the questions are grouped so that each group can be answered by one team: questions 1 to 3 by finance, questions 4 to 6 by the elections team, and questions 7 and 8 by whoever holds the staffing information.
I should be explicit about how those first two groups relate, because it has caused confusion elsewhere. Part A is not about elections. It concerns the organisation as a whole — every department, and all correspondence sent to residents whatever the service area, including council tax, benefits, waste, housing and planning. Part B is the election-related part and concerns only the annual canvass. The two do not overlap, and a figure covering electoral registration alone would not answer Part A.
Fourth, if any single question would take the request over the appropriate cost limit under section 12, please tell me which one and I will withdraw it, rather than the request being refused as a whole. I would be glad to agree a narrower wording by email before any work is done on it, in the spirit of the duty to advise and assist under section 16.
PART A — CORRESPONDENCE WITH RESIDENTS (ALL DEPARTMENTS — NOT ELECTIONS)
1. The total amount spent by the council on printing and posting correspondence to residents during the period, across the organisation as a whole. This is not limited to electoral or canvass mail. A single whole-organisation total is sufficient.
2. The number of items posted to residents during the same period, if this is recorded.
3. The total amount spent on SMS or text messaging to residents during the same period, and the number of messages sent, if these are recorded.
PART B — THE ANNUAL CANVASS
4. The total cost to the council of the 2025 annual canvass — that is, the most recently completed canvass, whose revised register was published on 1 December 2025 — including printing, postage, staffing and any personal canvasser visits. If the canvass cost is not recorded separately from the council’s general print and postage budget, please say so.
5. For that same canvass: the number of residential properties to which a canvass communication was sent; the number that did not respond to the first communication; the number of reminder communications sent; and the number of household visits carried out.
6. For that same canvass, the number of responses received by each route — paper, online, telephone and SMS — if this breakdown is recorded.
PART C — WHO HOLDS THIS WORK
7. The job title and, if the council is willing to share it, the direct contact details of the officer responsible for resident communications, customer contact strategy or digital transformation.
8. The job title and, if the council is willing to share it, the direct contact details of the Electoral Registration Officer and of the officer who manages the annual canvass day to day.
I am content to receive the response electronically, and I understand the statutory period is twenty working days.
One last thing, which is an offer rather than a request. The same questions have gone to a number of district councils in England. Any council that responds is welcome to a copy of the comparative results, showing where it sits against the others, with the case reference against every figure so that anything in it can be checked at source. It is provided at no cost and on no conditions. You do not need to do anything to receive it beyond answering this request, and you are under no obligation to take it.
Miguel Ângelo Vilela Rodrigues (University of Minho), with Oliver Meza (CIDE) and Carmen Navarro (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Gerrymandering is usually filed away as an American problem — a decennial ritual of oddly shaped congressional districts and litigation. But the practice does not require an American ballot. It requires only two things: a boundary that has to be redrawn, and a politician with an interest in where the line falls. Territorial reform supplies both, and it does so in countries that would never describe themselves as having a redistricting problem.
Portugal is a case in point. In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we look at the 2013 reform that amalgamated Portuguese sub-municipal units — the freguesias, roughly comparable to parishes — and ask a question that the amalgamation literature has largely left aside: not whether mergers deliver economies of scale or damage local democracy, but who decides which units merge with which, and what they get out of it.
A reform designed to be captured
The reform came out of the 2011 Memorandum of Understanding with the troika. Cutting the number of local entities was one of the commitments made, and central government initially tried to impose specific merger criteria from above. Local government rejected that outright. So the government softened its approach: it kept the targets — urban units to be reduced by 50–55 per cent, rural ones by 25–35 per cent — and handed the map itself to the mayors. Across 278 municipalities, the number of sub-municipal units fell from 4,269 to 3,092.
The design has an unusual feature. The units that had to merge were not the units that decided. Mayors drew the proposals; municipal assemblies approved them. And Portuguese municipal assemblies are hybrid bodies: alongside directly elected members, every sub-municipal president in the jurisdiction sits with a full vote. Sub-municipal presidents are also, in practice, part of a mayor’s electoral machinery — the people who campaign, mobilise and deliver a vote in their own patch.
That makes an amalgamation reform something more than an administrative exercise. Reducing the number of sub-municipal units aligned with the mayor’s party reduces the mayor’s support in the assembly that approves the budget and the investment plan, and thins out the voices in the field who will be needed at the next election. Conversely, a well-drawn map can pack opponents into a single unit or dilute them inside a larger friendly one. The pencil was handed to precisely the actors with most to gain from how it moved.
Vulnerability and feasibility
We modelled the mayor’s decision on two dimensions. The first is vulnerability: does the mayor have a majority of politically aligned sub-municipal units, or not? The second is feasibility: does the mayor command a majority of the elected seats in the municipal assembly, and so the ability to get a map approved without concessions?
Crossing them yields four situations. Where mayors are not vulnerable, redrawing is either irrelevant or indifferent — there is nothing to gain. Where they are vulnerable but lack an assembly majority, redrawing is crucial to survival but has to be negotiated, which means sharing the spoils. Where they are vulnerable and hold the assembly, redrawing is appealing: the incentive and the means coincide.
Using the 2009 sub-municipal election results projected onto the new 2013 map — the only information mayors actually had when drawing it — we then estimated multinomial logit models on all 278 affected municipalities.
The pattern is clear. Across the country, 51 per cent of municipalities ended up with more aligned sub-municipal units after a reform whose entire purpose was to reduce their number. In the appealing quadrant, the odds of an increase in aligned units rise more than nine-fold; in the crucial quadrant, where the map has to survive a coalition, they rise just over four-fold. The gap between the two is itself the finding: opposition parties will not sign off on a map that benefits the incumbent alone, so the gains get shared and diluted. Results hold when we substitute a vote-efficiency measure of the kind used in the US gerrymandering literature.
Why this should interest anyone outside Portugal
Two implications travel. The first is procedural. Structural reform is often delegated downwards on the sensible-sounding grounds that local actors know their own territory. They do — and they also know their own electoral arithmetic. Where the reform reshapes the boundaries that determine who sits in the body that scrutinises the reformer, delegation is not neutral. Anyone currently watching local government reorganisation in England, where boundaries, wards and the composition of new authorities are all in play, may find the logic familiar.
The second is about what happens next. Since 2013 there has been sustained pressure in Portugal to demerge some units, and the initiative for those petitions again rests with mayors. If the same rationality holds, demergers will be permitted where they are politically harmless and blocked where they are not — meaning the same territories get gerrymandered twice.
None of this requires bad faith or illegality. Every map was lawful and approved through proper procedure. That is rather the point: an effective opposition, not a rule about compactness, was the only thing that reliably constrained the outcome.
Miguel Ângelo Vilela Rodrigues is Associate Professor with Habilitation in the Department of Political Science, School of Economics and Management, University of Minho, and a researcher at CICP.
The full article — ‘Gerrymandering to survive: an explanation of the political conditions that shaped mayors’ decisions over an amalgamation process in Portugal’, by Miguel Rodrigues, Oliver Meza and Carmen Navarro — is published in Local Government Studies, 51(5), 993–1015. DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2024.2404104
Dr Gulay Icoz, Visiting Research Fellow, Middlesex University London
In theory, the 2026 Tower Hamlets local elections should have been a test of democratic accountability in action. The borough entered election year under active statutory intervention. A Best Value Inspection published in November 2024 had documented serious governance failings under Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire administration: weak internal controls, a culture of concentrated executive authority, poor transparency, and slow responses to statutory recommendations. A further written ministerial statement in January 2026 confirmed ongoing failures and deteriorating financial governance. In March 2026 — just two months before polling day — the Secretary of State escalated the intervention, granting ministerial envoys enhanced powers to step in directly if the council continued to breach its Best Value Duty.
Then voters went to the polls and Aspire won 33 of 45 council seats. Lutfur Rahman was re-elected as Executive Mayor for a third time. Labour was reduced to five seats — its lowest total in the borough’s history.
I stood as the Labour candidate for Bethnal Green West in those elections. What I observed — during the campaign and in the results — reveals a deeper tension between statutory accountability and community-level democratic legitimacy: one with implications that reach well beyond Tower Hamlets.
The structural picture
The results reveal a distortion that deserves wider attention. Aspire secured 73 per cent of council seats with just over 32 per cent of the vote. Labour and the Green Party each received just under 23 per cent of the vote, yet each won only 11 per cent of seats. In ward after ward, the combined Labour and Green vote exceeded Aspire’s total — yet the block voting system used in multi-member wards — where each voter casts as many votes as there are seats and the top candidates win — converted vote fragmentation into a decisive seat bonus for the incumbent. This is sometimes called plurality block voting, and it rewards coordinated slate-voting, which incumbent parties with strong voter loyalty are structurally better placed to exploit.
The ward-level picture sharpens this further. In Bethnal Green West, Labour entered polling day with an estimated core vote of around 540; Aspire’s coordinated bloc was already three times that size, with split votes running into the thousands. Green candidates who had run no sustained local campaign outpolled every Labour candidate standing — a pattern repeated across wards throughout the borough. The block voting system had no mechanism to reward breadth of engagement or effort: it simply rewarded the most organised and unified voting bloc.
It is worth distinguishing block voting in multi-member wards from single-member first-past-the-post. The coordination premium is structurally higher: a cohesive 32 per cent bloc can sweep three seats simultaneously in a way that would not occur in a series of individual contests. The question this blog is asking is not primarily about proportionality per se, but whether the electoral system can transmit accountability signals when a council is under active statutory intervention for documented governance failure.
This points to a question the electoral systems literature and the local democracy literature have rarely addressed together: when opposition parties are structurally disadvantaged by electoral mechanics, what additional tools does a democratic accountability framework need?
The accountability paradox
A long line of research — from Fiorina’s retrospective voting model through Powell and Whitten’s clarity-of-responsibility framework — establishes that electoral punishment for governance failure is neither automatic nor uniform. Recent scholarship sharpens this further: voters weigh integrity against perceived competence and community delivery (Breitenstein and Hernández, 2024); punishment weakens when opposition is fragmented and alternation unclear (Otjes and Stiers, 2022); and elections are in any case a blunt accountability instrument compared to courts, oversight bodies, and civic challenge (Papadopoulos, 2023). The established literature identifies three conditions that must be met for punishment to occur: voters must have clear information about failure; they must be able to attribute responsibility to the correct actor; and accountability must not be crowded out by competing loyalties or trade-offs. Tower Hamlets 2026 illustrates the failure of all three conditions simultaneously.
Yet the Tower Hamlets case also points to a fourth condition, largely absent from the existing retrospective voting literature: the accountability mechanism itself must be seen as legitimate by the communities it is meant to protect. This is the accountability paradox at the heart of the 2026 result — and it is a contribution that the standard retrospective voting framework is not equipped to capture.
For intervention to function as a democratic corrective, it must be perceived by the electorate — and particularly by the communities most affected by governance failure — as rational, impartial, and operating in their interests. Where that perception fails, intervention becomes politically legible as external imposition, and voting for the incumbent becomes an act of community solidarity rather than an endorsement of governance failure. This dynamic is not accidental: it is actively constructed through political framing, and incumbents with strong identity-based bonds with their electorate are structurally well-placed to construct it.
Recent research on statutory intervention in English local government proposes a five-stage model — crisis revelation, delegitimisation, imposed reforms, capacity building, and restoration — and argues that interventions must be carefully designed to appear rational rather than political if they are to maintain rather than undermine faith in local democracy (Lowther, Joyce and Whiteman, 2025). That model’s second stage — delegitimisation — describes central government’s work to undermine the legitimacy of the council being intervened in. What the Tower Hamlets 2026 election reveals is that delegitimisation can also operate in the opposite direction: the incumbent successfully turned the intervention itself into the object of delegitimisation in the eyes of the electorate, making the accountability mechanism the thing that lacked legitimacy rather than the council it was designed to hold to account.
Conversations on the doorstep revealed the depth of this reframing. Many Aspire supporters had not engaged with the contents of the Best Value report because they had already concluded the report itself was politically motivated — a tool of mainstream parties who disapproved of what Aspire represented rather than a genuine accountability mechanism. More striking still, when specific governance failures were raised — including nepotism and unqualified appointments — some voters had internalised a counter-narrative in which such practices represented community protection rather than misconduct.
It would be reductive to dismiss these perceptions as simply the product of misinformation. Communities with long experience of political marginalisation may have genuine historical grounds for scepticism toward central government intervention, and those experiences shape how accountability claims are received. What the Tower Hamlets case illustrates is the extent to which this pre-existing disposition was mobilised and amplified through deliberate political communication — producing not political apathy but the successful reconstruction of what accountability itself means.
This is not unique to Tower Hamlets. It is a dynamic that researchers of democratic resilience and local governance are increasingly attentive to, and it raises important questions about how accountability mechanisms are designed, communicated, and embedded — questions that are as much about institutional culture and civic trust as they are about statutory frameworks.
Tower Hamlets in context
Tower Hamlets did not stand alone in 2026. The elections produced historic Green gains across inner London — in Hackney, Waltham Forest, Lewisham and Southwark — and a significant realignment of the progressive vote away from Labour. What makes Tower Hamlets distinctive is that this regional realignment intersected with the specific dynamics of the Aspire incumbency, the governance intervention, and the structural incentives of block voting, producing an outcome more disproportionate than anywhere else in the capital.
Understanding whether Tower Hamlets represents an outlier or an advance indicator requires systematic comparison. Several English councils have been subject to statutory intervention in recent years — including Birmingham, Croydon, Slough, Sandwell, and Thurrock — yet the relationship between intervention, governance accountability, and subsequent electoral outcomes has received little comparative attention. Whether the accountability paradox identified here is specific to Tower Hamlets or reflects a broader pattern in how statutory intervention interacts with local political culture is a question that future comparative research must address.
The stakes
What the Tower Hamlets elections confirm, above all, is that democratic resilience is not reducible to electoral outcomes. The borough’s communities — residents navigating overcrowded housing, fractured services, and the cumulative pressures of one of England’s most deprived urban environments — continue to engage, organise, and hold their representatives to account through multiple channels. That engagement, not any single election result, is the foundation on which accountable local governance must ultimately be rebuilt.
What forms of accountability can work when statutory intervention loses legitimacy in the eyes of the very communities it is meant to protect?
Dr Gulay Icoz is a Visiting Research Fellow at Middlesex University London and stood as the Labour candidate for Bethnal Green West in the May 2026 local elections and Former Councillor in Hackney (2006–2014). She researches democratic resilience, local governance, and progressive voter realignment in inner London.
References
Academic sources
Breitenstein, S. and Hernández, E. (2024) ‘Too Crooked to be Good? Trade-offs in the Electoral Punishment of Malfeasance and Corruption’, European Political Science Review. doi:10.1017/S175577392400016X
Fiorina, M.P. (1981) Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Otjes, S. and Stiers, D. (2022) ‘Accountability and alternation: How wholesale and partial alternation condition retrospective voting’, Party Politics, 28(3), pp. 457–467.
Papadopoulos, Y. (2023) Understanding Accountability in Democratic Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Elements in Public Policy).
Powell, G.B. and Whitten, G.D. (1993) ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context’, American Journal of Political Science, 37(2), pp. 391–414.
Government documents
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (2024) Best Value Inspection Report: London Borough of Tower Hamlets. London: MHCLG. November 2024.
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (2026) Written Ministerial Statement: Tower Hamlets Best Value Intervention. London: MHCLG. January 2026.
Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (2026) Enhanced Intervention Powers: Tower Hamlets. Ministerial Announcement. March 2026.
The sad state of many neighbourhoods and communities, with their desolated high streets, has been identified as a significant driver of the rejection of politicians and political parties which lay behind the May 2026 local election results
As the shallowness of programmes such as Pride in Place demonstrates, this is not an issue that central government can tackle alone. It requires local action reflecting local circumstances. Yet local councils lack the resources and levers to secure lasting improvements. Meeting this challenge requires deep collaboration between central and local government at a time when changes in political control locally will make that more difficult to achieve than ever.
Is it too naïve to hope that engagement between local political actors, local people and local organisations and groups could inform new approaches to revitalise struggling local communities? Could the involvement of national politicians in the process secure the reform of local government finance and the provision of new powers necessary to enable localities to act?
Writing in 1939, when he was leader of the Labour Group on Oxford City Council, Richard Crossman, argued that one of the strongest arguments for local party politics “is that they do provide a method of creating interest and focussing attention upon the enormously important issues as stake.” Crossman, who went to serve as Harold Wilson’s Minister for Housing and Local Government, added that “the real basis of successful political democracy is not to be found in politics at all, but below the surface in the organisation of a whole network of popular interests into pressure groups.”
Writing just over 40 years later, when he was leader of Sheffield Council, David Blunkett also called for collective local action. He argued that politicians and communities should “do things together rather than having them done for us, to remove the conditions of poverty and dependence rather than trap people in them, and thus to develop a sense of supporting and being supported.” He made a similar point in 2004, when he was Home Secretary, recognising the importance of a partnership between local politicians and citizens “to revitalise democracy and strengthen citizenship and civil society, so that people are part of the process of reform and modernisation.”
Now more than ever it is important to follow the advice of Crossman and Blunkett and refresh local politics through collaboration with local groups and communities to deliver improvements locally and secure reforms nationally to enable that local action. Succeeding in doing this could also begin to restore trust in politics and politicians.
Phil Swann is studying for a PhD at INLOGOV in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, University of Birmingham, on the contribution of politicians to central-local government relations.
With dozens of English councils and hundreds of councillors facing delays to this year’s May elections, opponents claim the move could undermine public trust in democracy. History shows deferral of elections in similar circumstances is rare but not exceptional. There are however far bigger threats to the UK’s democracy.
Media reports today are suggesting that more than a third of eligible English councils have requested to delay their planned May 2026 local elections, potentially requiring around 600 councillors to serve an additional year. These councils state that the Government’s ongoing local government restructure makes it difficult to run the polls effectively at the planned dates, and central government claims holding elections for councils that are soon to be abolished would waste time and money.
But the delays have sparked criticism, and even led to unrest at this week’s Redditch council meeting. Opponents argue the move weakens democratic accountability. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage denounced the proposal as “monstrous”, claiming that “denying elections is the behaviour of a banana republic” and threatening a judicial review. Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs have also criticised the move. The Electoral Commission’s chief executive said: “As a matter of principle, we do not think that capacity constraints are a legitimate reason for delaying long planned elections. Extending existing mandates risks affecting the legitimacy of local decision making and damaging public confidence.”
Delays to local elections in England have occurred previously. During the Second World War, all local elections were suspended between 1939 and 1944, making this the most extensive postponement in modern history. In peacetime, delays have largely been tied to local government reorganisation, most notably in the 1990s, when Parliament approved major structural reforms that abolished counties such as Avon, Cleveland, and Humberside and created 46 new unitary authorities. These reforms led to altered or cancelled election dates to align with the establishment of new councils and avoid electing councillors to authorities that were about to be dissolved. In 2025, nine councils had their elections delayed by one year to support transitions to new unitary structures.
But even though there are clear precedents for the current electoral postponements, there are other longer-term, more significant and worrying trends which risk seriously undermining our democracy. Academic commentary shows growing concern among constitutional scholars that the UK’s democratic safeguards have weakened in recent years.
Scholars at the UCL Constitution Unit warned in 2022 that the UK faced a real risk of “democratic backsliding,” defined as a gradual erosion of checks and balances, growing executive dominance, attacks on civil liberties and the weakening of political norms that traditionally safeguarded constitutional stability. Their analysis emphasised that democratic decline can occur incrementally through the actions of elected leaders, especially in systems like the UK’s where constitutional rules are flexible and can be rapidly altered.
Further alarm was raised by Professor Alison Young at the University of Cambridge, who described the UK as standing on a “constitutional cliff‑edge.” In her 2023 book, she argued that a series of constitutional changes and executive‑centric reforms have strengthened government power while weakening the political and legal checks that previously constrained it. Young warned that without reforms to reinforce accountability, transparency, and oversight, the UK risks drifting towards “unchecked power,” eroding the democratic norms that underpin good governance.
Last year, Dr Sean Kippin of the University of Stirling argued that recent Conservative governments engaged in “democratic backsliding” by deploying what he calls an “illiberal playbook,” using both lawful and legally dubious tools to weaken institutional checks, restrict protest rights, and compromise the independence of the Electoral Commission. His research concludes that “between 2016 and 2024, the Conservatives used power to diminish, weaken, and compromise Britain’s already imperfect democracy”.
There have been some positive moves by the ‘new’ Labour government to improve the functioning of our democratic system, such as the widening of voter ID criteria and promises to lower the voting age to16. However, overall there hasn’t yet been commitment to fundamental reforms to address the issues identified in the above reports, such as the impact of donations on political impartiality, and there have been some worrying developments, for example around civil liberties and the right to protest.
A year’s deferral of elections to a disappearing council doesn’t fundamentally undermine our democracy, but failing to address the longer term and serious issues of democratic backsliding could prepare the way for those who will.
Dr Jason Lowther is director of INLOGOV (the Institute of Local Government Studies) at the University of Birmingham.
References
Kippin, S., 2025. Democratic backsliding and public administration: the experience of the UK. Policy Studies, pp.1-20.
Russell, M., Renwick, A. and James, L., 2022. What is democratic backsliding, and is the UK at risk. The Constitutional Unit Briefing.
Young, A.L., 2023. Unchecked power?: How recent constitutional reforms are threatening UK democracy. Policy Press.
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