Closing summary
This blog will be closing shortly. Thank you for reading the updates and for commenting below the line today.
There are still some council results to come in and you can keep up to date with those in our results tracker:
You can also find all our local elections 2025 coverage here and take a look at how the big parties fared in Peter Walker’s verdict:
Below is a summary of the key events from today:
Nigel Farage claimed he had broken the grip of Britain’s two main political parties as Reform UK gained an MP and swept to a string of victories in England’s local elections, making deep inroads into Labour and Conservative heartlands. On a sobering day for Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch that brought immediate recriminations, Reform UK took hundreds of councillors from the struggling Tories and won the Runcorn and Helsby byelection by just six votes ahead of Labour. Of the six mayoral elections, Labour won three of them, Reform UK won two and the Conservatives won one.
In further signs of fracturing political loyalties, a BBC projection of how the voting would have looked in a UK-wide election put Reform first on 30%, Labour on 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 17%, the Conservatives fourth with 15% and the Greens on 11%.
Speaking at a rally, Farage said the elections marked “the beginning of the end of the Conservative party”. Toasting newly elected councillors in Staffordshire, Farage said the results of the local and mayoral elections represented a “seismic” change in British politics. He said the next target for Reform UK would be the Welsh and Scottish parliamentary elections.
The Liberal Democrats made renewed gains in previously Conservative heartlands, taking control in Oxfordshire as the Tories lost 15 seats, and also taking over in Cambridgeshire and Shropshire. The Greens picked up dozens of new councillors and came third in the West of England mayoral race, one they had harboured hopes of winning. Lib Dem leader Ed Davey claimed Friday’s results had put his party on track to overtake the Tories at the next general election. He also said the Lib Dems had replaced the Tories as the “party of middle England”.
More surprising was the scale of Labour losses, with the party losing proportionally fewer seats than the Tories, but with some major localised drubbings, such as a net loss of 38 seats in Durham and 27 in Lancashire. Speaking on a visit to a defence factory in Luton, Starmer said: “What I want to say is, my response is, we get it. We were elected in last year to bring about change … I am determined that we will go further and faster on the change that people want to see.”
Kemi Badenoch apologised to Conservative councillors who lost their seats on Friday. The Conservative party leader said that while the public were “fed up” with Labour, they were not yet ready to trust the Tories. Earlier on Friday Badenoch said the elections were always going to be difficult for Tories, and renewal of her party had “only just begun”.
Ros Jones held off Reform UK to keep the Doncaster mayoralty but was among the most vocal critics of Starmer’s record on Friday, highlighting cuts to the winter fuel allowance as a subject stoking voters’ anger, as well as reductions in disability payments and a rise in national insurance. There was also criticism from a number of Labour MPs, albeit with those going public tending to be from the left of the party.
Nigel Farage suggested that Reform UK could cut diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and climate change policy jobs, as well as ending working from home. He told the BBC: “If you work from home, forget it. If you’re a DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] officer, I suggest you look for another job.” Speaking in Staffordshire, the Reform UK leader said: “Maybe a bit of a warning if you do work for Staffordshire county council and you are involved in climate change policy, or involved with DEI, or anything like that. It may be time to go and look for a different job because we want county councils to do what they are there to do.”
Updated
Labour will have to take Thursday’s local election results “on the chin”, a senior cabinet minister has said.
Pat McFadden told Sky News:
I think when you get poor results, there’s no point in soft soaping it or trying to dance around it, they are poor results, anybody can see that looking at them.
You’ve got to take that on the chin when you’re in government. This happens at local elections sometimes and you’ve got to respond to them.
Saying he could “understand people’s sense of anger and frustration”, he insisted that the government was bringing change to the country, reports the PA news agency.
He added:
We have got to keep our foot on the gas, keep changing things and the critical heart of it is people want to see their living standards go up and those waiting lists go down.
