Parish councils and political parties: some initial findings

Drawing on a database of 1,720 town and parish council election results, this blog considers the position of political parties in the ‘first tier’ of England’s local government.¹

Some highlights:

• 12.9% of town and parish councillors were elected for a political party.

• 15.3% of councils have at least one party political member; 1.7% are entirely occupied by political party members.

• 58.5% of party councillors were elected in a poll, compared to 10.7% of non-party councillors.

• 10% of town and parish council candidates also stood for principal council elections on the same day - but not always under the same ballot description.

Parties and parishes

Political party involvement on town and parish councils has always been controversial.² A common view is that party politics tends to get in the way of councillors representing their communities on such a local level, and that parties sow unnecessary division. A non-party council can, it is argued, draw on the talent of everyone in their area. On the other hand, ‘all politics is local’: the existence of parties gives voters a clear choice between competing values or proposals in a way that independents may not.³

Quality data on political parties in town and parish councils is hard to come by. In 2021, a survey of 591 councils in England and Wales found that 23% were controlled by ‘national’ political parties, up from 4% reported in 1991 by a similar survey.⁴ In 2010, a survey of 420 councils found 19% were run ‘on political lines’, with 48% reporting that at least one of their councillors represented a political party.⁵ How representative these surveys are is difficult to judge: none consulted more than 6% of councils.

We’ve now collected returns for two years (2024 & 2025) of English local council elections - that’s 1,720 councils, or 20.5% of all local councils in England. This data covers 181 town councils and 1,539 parish councils, across 45 different local authorities. It should be noted, however, that these figures represent only what happened at the elections, and do not take into account subsequent changes to councils via co-option or resignations.

A list of all the councils included in this blog, and their political composition, can be accessed here.

Councillors

The vast majority of town and parish councillors are unaffiliated. Of the 12,683 councillors elected in 2024/2025, only 12.9% were elected for a registered political party.

However, political party councillors are not spread evenly: two thirds of them sit on town councils, despite town councils making up only 10.5% of the councils in our database.

15.3% of these councils have at least one party member; 6.3% have half or more of their members from parties; 1.7% are entirely occupied by party members.

68 councils (4%) had a majority of their members elected from a single national party. Obviously, due to coalitions, the number controlled by parties will be higher than this.

Additionally, three councils have majorities from local political parties: Devizes (Wiltshire), Loughton (Epping), Seaham (Durham).

Elections

One key finding from our data is that the involvement of political party candidates in parishes appears to create more contested elections, boosting participation and voter choice. Whether this is always a casual relationship is open to interpretation (contested elections are more likely to occur on larger town councils regardless of party involvement), but the fact that over 70% of polls in both years had parties on the ballot is strongly suggestive - see also the case of Royal Wotton Bassett, below.

Overall, party councillors are much more likely to be elected by voters: 58.5% of party-political councillors were elected by poll, while only 10.7% of unaffiliated councillors were.

In 2025, Independents won at least one seat in 54.8% of polls, although they only won 35.8% of seats in these polls overall.

Going non-political

As mentioned, party political involvement on councils is controversial. In recent decades there have been attempts to try and reduce the number of councils run on political lines - the National Association of Local Councils offers guidance on this, for example. It is not unknown for councils to have ‘no party politics’ written into their standing orders.⁶

Royal Wootton Bassett Town Council illustrates what this process looks like, and the effect the removal of political parties can have on elections. In the 2021 elections, the council had 30 candidates for its 16 seats, with all three wards going to a poll. The result was an exact 50/50 split between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, which presumably produced a lot of deadlocked meetings.

In February 2025, following a consultation process, the council resolved to move to a non-political model, which it believes will reduce division and allow councillors to better represent their residents’ views. While the decision to move to a non-political model has no legal force in electoral law, the effect on the 2025 elections was dramatic: the number of party candidates dropped from 29 to two. However, the overall number of candidates also dropped by 50%, with only two wards experiencing polls, and each of these only had one more candidate than there were seats. The shift to a non-political council seems clearly to have reduced the number of people interested in standing for election, and almost entirely removed voter choice - but, if those people were only standing to fly the flag for their party, perhaps this reduction simply represents a removal of those who were less interested in being councillors in the first place.

Non-political party members?

But how non-political are these councillors? Of the Royal Wootton Bassett councillors elected in 2025, seven were incumbents, and there’s no suggestion that they have ceased to be members of their respective parties.

How common is this? In an attempt to find out, we have had a go at matching our database of principal council candidates to an OCR-generated list of parish council candidates from 2025. These figures should be treated with caution, but we’re pretty confident in the overall picture.

We identified 977 candidates who we think stood for both parish and principal council seats in May 2025 - that’s 10% of all parish council candidates. Of these, 840 stood for a political party in the principal council election, but only 537 did so at the local level. This means that 303 candidates stood for a political party in the principal council election, but contested the parish election without a party label (the remaining 137 candidates stood as independents in both: no-one stood as an independent at the principal level but for a party at the parish level).

It should be added that there is no suggestion of impropriety here - it is perfectly legal to stand for different elections under different descriptions. If elected, many parish councillors mention their party membership in their register of interests, but this practise does not appear to be universal.

Thanks for reading

If you’re interested in this subject and want to learn more, check out our earlier blogs on the 2024 and 2025 local council elections. For more information on town and parish councils, please visit the NALC website.

We hope to produce more blogs like this once our elections database has expanded in a year or two’s time. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have questions or suggestions for further research!

Image source.