What's up for election in 2025?

The county council’s last hurrah?

Local elections will be held in England on 1 May. Read on for an overview, or head to WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk to find out if you have elections in your area.

English council elections work on a four-year schedule. Traditionally, district councils elect one third of their councillors each year, with county councils electing all of their councillors in the fourth year. This is the county council year; they last held elections in May 2021. That year saw the whole of Great Britain go to the polls following the postponement of the 2020 elections due to the pandemic, and in many places districts and counties held elections at the same time. This year, by contrast, things are much simpler, with elections only in England.

Late in 2024 the government announced proposals to replace the district/county model with unitary councils, while also introducing more devolution. As a consequence, elections in nine council areas have been postponed: more on that after the numbers.

Due to the postponements, 2025 will be the smallest set of UK council elections (in terms of councillors elected) since 1975.¹

Councillors

1,657 councillors are due to be elected across 1,406 wards in 23 councils on 1 May:

• 14 county councils (919 councillors).
• Eight unitary authorities (667 councillors).
• One metropolitan district (55 councillors).
• The Isles of Scilly (16 councillors).

Eleven of these councils are holding elections on new boundaries. These include fairly radical changes in Buckinghamshire, which has shed 50 councillors compared to the last election; Durham, too, has lost 28. Overall, 95 seats have been cut across the 23 councils compared with their last elections.

There will also be elections to approximately 1,250 parish and town councils (over 11,000 seats). We do not cover these elections on our lookup, but will be producing a report on them with the National Association of Local Councils after the elections.

Mayors

Two councils are directly electing local authority mayors. Doncaster is electing the whole council and mayor, while North Tyneside is only electing its mayor.

Four combined authorities will be electing ‘metro mayors’. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and the West of England are each holding their third elections (and first under First Past the Post). The newly minted Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire are holding inaugural votes.

Postponed elections

Initially, 33 councils were scheduled to hold elections in 2025. However, late last year the government published its much anticipated white paper on devolution. This included proposals for a widespread reorganisation of English local government. Essentially, the government proposes abolishing all district and county councils and creating new unitary councils in their place, as well as reorganising some existing unitary councils. It also proposes creating Combined Authorities in all areas which do not yet have one.

To facilitate this, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government invited councils to express interest in becoming ‘priority’ areas for reorganisation. Eighteen councils did so. On 5 February, it was announced that nine councils will have their elections postponed, and these are now likely to take place in 2026.

The law postponing these elections took effect on 4 March. It delays elections in these areas for a year.

The nine councils were due to elect 599 councillors, reducing the number up for election on 1 May by 26.6%.

Is it unusual to postpone elections like this?
Postponement of elections is not unusual in recent practice. As Full Fact has pointed out (and we discussed last year), elections in some councils were postponed in 2019 and 2021 to allow for reorganisation, and Labour have used the same method as the then Conservative government. What makes this year’s postponements different is the scale, with nine councils encompassing around five million voters - by contrast, in 2021 the six councils which had their elections postponed contained fewer than a million voters.

Key dates

Candidate lists are published by councils on 2 and 3 April. The voter registration deadline is 11 April, and postal votes must be applied for by 14 April (though your council would appreciate you applying sooner than that!). Polling day is 1 May.

🏰

Image: Oxford County Hall, headquarters of Oxfordshire County Council.