The 2024 Parish and Town council elections

Local Councils

Parish and town (‘local’) councils are often called the ‘first tier’ of local government. Around 35% of England has such a council, translating into around 10,000 councils. Parishes are mostly rural and often tiny, although some larger urban areas in unitary authorities have them, and they are growing in scale: this tax year, local councils raised £781 million from council tax. Democracy Club does not cover these councils in our lookup services, although we experimented with them back in 2021.

Parish councils are growing in importance. As more unitary councils have been created, bigger and more powerful urban parishes have been introduced. This financial year, 124 parish councils raised £1 million or more in council tax.

Hitherto, data on parish council elections has not been collected or published openly. Determined to fill this gap, the National Association of Local Councils (NALC), approached Democracy Club early last year, offering to partner with us to collect the candidates and election results of the 2024 local elections. This forms part of their involvement in the Local Government Association’s Be a Councillor campaign.

Working with Democracy Club’s resident parish expert, Stuart Orford, we collected data on all parishes holding scheduled elections on 2 May 2024. This included councils, wards, and seats; candidates; election results and turnout (but not votes cast). The data reflects the information published by councils on their websites.

NALC have published their own summary, here.

You can view the full dataset here, or continue reading for a summary.

Understanding the elections

It should be understood that a large number of town and parish councillors are co-opted after the election has concluded. Consequently, the following data does not completely reflect the current makeup of the councils in question, but it does give a good idea of the level of interest and competition in becoming a parish councillor. There are reasons co-option might be preferred by some councils: it can be used to bring particular skills onto the council, or simply to avoid the costs of an election (local council pay their district or unitary council for the cost of elections, which in the case of small councils could consume some or all of that year’s budget).

Town and parish councils typically elect their entire council in one go, often in sync with their higher-tier council.

Councils

446 town and parish councils held elections in May, across 33 local authorities, of which seven held elections for all their parishes. A third (33.9%) of all parishes up for election were in Dorset.

The larger councils holding elections included Bridport, Dorchester, Kidderminster, Loughton, West Bletchley and Weymouth. Each of these have 20 or more councillors and have an income from council tax at or above £1 million.

Councillors

A total 4,207 seats were up for grabs, across 795 different wards.

3,709 candidates contested these seats. However, as these candidates were not spread evenly across the country, only 90.8% won a seat, with 838 seats left unfilled after the elections were over. Nine councils were left inquorate (having 2 or fewer councillors), of which four had no councillors elected at all.

Only 136 wards (17%) had enough candidates for a poll in May, and of these, 56 had only one more candidate than there were seats. In total 66 parish and town councils (14.8%) saw contested elections. The most heavily contested council was Kidderminster, where 46 candidates fought for 18 seats, with all six wards contested. Polls were much more likely to occur in town than parish councils. Town councils are much more heavily contested than parish councils: 58.1% of polls occurred in town councils, despite town councils only making up 20.8% of the wards holding elections.

Turnout averaged at 34% across all the wards where this was published.¹

The highest turnout (62%!) was in the West Stours ward of Stours Parish Council, where 110 of the ward’s 176 electors cast a ballot. Lowest (21%) was in Darwen Town Council’s East ward.

Candidates

Unlike other UK elections, the vast majority of people who put themselves forward for parish councils do so as independents - political parties tend to fight only the larger town councils. In total, parties registered with the Electoral Commission won 473 seats, or 11.2%

Whether or not a ward had a poll was heavily influenced by political party involvement. Although Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and Green candidates made up only 16.5% of all candidates, they constituted 45.2% of candidates in wards with a poll; only 28.9% polls had no representative from one of these parties.²

Parish elections are also unique in that candidates can put whatever they like as their ‘description’ on the ballot paper (as long as it’s no more than six words). In some cases this is used by organised groups (“Littlemore Together”, “Ferndown People’s Alliance”, etc), but more often than not it is used by individuals to distinguish themselves from other independents. Stuart has pulled out some of the best examples on his blog.

The next elections

We will be continuing this project in 2025, and hope to turn this into a regular publication. 2025 will see a larger number of parish elections: approximately 1,250+ councils and over 11,000 seats.

Image: Kidderminster town centre