Local elections 2025: The first public test for party leaders

This week's set of elections across England will be a series of firsts: it will be the first big ballot box test of Sir Keir Starmer's premiership and Kemi Badenoch's leadership of the Conservative Party.

We will have the first by-election of this parliament in Labour-held Runcorn, the inaugural elections for the mayoralty of Hull and East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and our first chance to see if Reform's surge in the polls since the general election can translate into seats. In play are over 1,600 council seats, six mayoralties and the Labour-held seat of Runcorn and Helsby after a by-election was triggered by the Labour MP Mike Amesbury punching a constituent on a night out.

And there is plenty at stake for the party leaders with all the upside in the hands of Nigel Farage, who has barely any council seats to defend and hundreds in his sights, as he looks to translate his poll leads into proper governing - be it through mayoral wins or council control. Sir Keir is bracing for an early verdict on his leadership, with the Runcorn by-election a test of nerves for a Labour Party that will be loathed to lose a seat in the northwest of England to a surging Reform Party.

For the Conservatives, the pressure is obvious and acute. Of the 23 councils up for grabs, 16 are currently controlled by the Conservative Party and when they last fought these seats in 2021, the Conservatives were riding high on the back of a then popular Boris Johnson and COVID vaccine bounce.

Back then, the party's national equivalent vote share - an estimate of how the country would have voted if everywhere had had a local election - was at 40%, with Labour at 30%, the Lib Dems at 15%, and other parties at 15%. Their support has collapsed since then, with current polling putting the Conservatives on 22% - an 18-point drop in vote share - while Reform, lumped in with 'other parties' in 2021, is now polling an average 25%.

So, expect to see the Conservatives lose control of councils and hundreds of seats as it haemorrhages support to Reform in a night that is set to be miserable for Kemi Badenoch and her party. The Conservatives have majorities in 18 of the 23 councils up for grabs, and could even see the Lib Dems overtake them to become the second-biggest party in local government when it comes to council control.

That would be a huge symbolic blow. The only glimmer of hope is whether the party can win the Cambridge and Peterborough mayoral race where a former Peterborough MP is looking to take the mayoralty from Labour.

But like the Conservatives, there is little for Labour to cling on to in this set of elections as the party prepares for a lacklustre night at the ballot box, reflecting its steady drop in the polls following the autumn budget. Support for Sir Keir's government dipped below 30% last November and has continued on that trajectory, with Labour currently polling on average around 23%.

Labour has been haemorrhaging council seats in council by-elections since the national poll last July, and insiders are briefing that the party looks set to lose control of Doncaster Council, the only one it has control of in this set of elections, and perhaps the mayoralty of the city. Since last July, there have been by-elections in 95 vacant Labour council seats and Labour has lost 43 of them.

But the biggest race on the night for Labour will be the Runcorn by-election, where Reform is challenging to take a parliamentary seat that has long been part of Labour's territory. While Reform set out with the aim to destroy the Conservative Party, Labour insiders know how bad the Reform surge is for their own prospects, with the party coming in second to Labour in 89 constituencies in the 2024 General Election.

The party is all too aware of the threat of Nigel Farage, as Reform taps into voters' disillusionment. "People voted for change in 2024," explains one Labour insider.

"We came in with the double whammy of public services on their knees and the economy facing big challenges, and we promised change. People will be judging us.

There is change - waiting lists for the NHS are falling six months in a row - but do people notice it yet? Arguably not." Labour is preparing to intensify attacks against Reform. The party is already using remarks made by Mr Farage around re-examining the NHS's funding model to launch a series of attack ads around the local elections and is likely to step this up ahead of polling day.

But the party is right to be worried by the Reform threat and to give you a bit of flavour of that, we ran a focus group of voters in Doncaster on the latest edition of the Electoral Dysfunction podcast to get a sense of the mood in a city about to re-elect its council and mayor. 'The country is stuck in a doom loop' Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, who carried out that focus group in Doncaster for us, told us that the group's disillusionment with politics and the main political parties was a common refrain all around the country.

"You know, people basically keep hitting the change button, right? You know, they did it in Brexit. They did in 2017 when [Jeremy] Corbyn does very well, Boris Johnson in 2019 was a sort of change and in 2024, change was literally the slogan of Keir Starmer's 2024 campaign.

"And they keep hitting that change and thinking they're not getting the change. And so actually it pervades right across the political spectrum.

It's not limited to just the Tories, Labour, Reform. It's just this sense that something isn't happening and the system isn't responding to what we want," Mr Tryl says.

The undertone of the focus group reflected this sentiment, as respondents honed in on very common top-three concerns across the country - cost of living, the NHS, immigration - but also the sense of mistrust in politicians of all hues. "It's not just that people think that the UK is in a bad state, you know, cost of living is bad, the NHS is bad, struggles with immigration, crime," Mr Tryl said.

"It's that they don't have faith in our political class to find solutions. I said recently, I think the UK public moves in a bit of a doom loop at the moment and we can't seem to find a way out of it and how that changes." This is helping Mr Farage's Reform as voters, turned off by the Tories and disappointed in Labour, look to hit the change button again.

"Britain is broken and needs Reform" is Mr Farage's pitch. That's not to say that he was universally liked in our Doncaster focus group.

"It wasn't actually massively effusive about Farage personally, and we're starting to pick that up in a few more focus groups," noted Mr Tryl. "It's rather more like, 'I like what Reform is saying' - people tend to particularly like what they say on immigration - but I've got a few questions about Farage and a word I've heard in other groups is baggage.

He's got a lot of baggage." He added: "What you're hearing there is people are slightly willing to put that... we tried the Tories for 14 years.

We're not that happy with what we've had from Labour so far. So we may as well roll the dice on this guy.

And I think that's what you're going to see next week is that rolling the dice." The Conservatives fared particularly badly with the Doncaster focus group, with just two out of the nine respondents even being able to name their leader Kemi Badenoch. "If you've got no public image whatsoever, and also no trust, then you're not going to pull any votes," was the brutal verdict of one respondent as Mr Johnson was brought up as a politician they thought of as more likeable, relatable and capable of taking on Reform.

As for Labour, only one of the respondents seemed prepared to give the government more time to turn around the country and deliver on election promises, with others voicing criticism over the government's handling of the winter fuel allowance cuts, high immigration levels and the lack of progress more broadly. Voters were also hostile to Sir Keir, who they believed to be out of touch, privileged and posh.

The best Sir Keir can hope for next week is, in the words of Mr Tryl is to "tread water" as we watch to see whether Reform can translate polling gains into real governing. A YouGov poll on Friday suggested Reform is in pole position to win the Lincolnshire mayoralty, while the party is ahead in the Hull and East Yorkshire battle, according to the polling.

Labour is also nervous about Reform in the Doncaster mayoral race. Expectations for Reform are high, with some pollsters predicting the party could make hundreds of gains in traditionally Conservative counties and have a chance of perhaps even gaining control of Labour-held Doncaster council or Durham, where Labour is the largest party.

Reform now has over 100 councillors, most of whom have defected from other parties, and is not defending any seats from 2021, so the only way for Mr Farage is up. Mr Tryl expects the Tories to lose 500 to 600 seats and Reform to pick up the same sort of numbers if it manages to organise its support and turn out the vote.

Read more:Labour and Reform in battle for Runcorn by-election seatKemi Badenoch does not rule out local coalitions with Reform So this will be a moment to test whether the Reform momentum in the polls translates into real progress on the ground and sees it become a major electoral force capable of challenging the two main parties across the country. In the general election, the party clocked up votes, but didn't manage to concentrate that support into concrete wins.

Can Reform change that in 2025? This set of local elections is far smaller than normal when it comes to the number of councils being contested than normal (Labour's restructuring of local government has left a number of elections postponed), while the 11 million eligible to vote in England are just a quarter of those who could cast a vote across the UK in last year's general election. But these polls are seriously consequential.

This will be a moment when we are able to better observe if the two-party system, battered in the 2024 General Election, really is dying. Last July, third parties secured more votes than ever and a record tally of seats as support for the two establishment parties hit a record low.

These elections could be the moment that Reform tastes real power and the Liberal Democrats surge. Voters keep saying they want real change.

On 1 May, we'll get a better sense of how serious they are in a set of elections that could point to a profoundly different future for British politics..