In just a few weeks, Sir Keir Starmer will face his biggest electoral test since Labour won a landslide victory in last July’s General Election - as millions of voters head to the polls at the start of May.
On May 1, 2025, people will head to their polling stations to vote for 1,631 council seats, 23 county, unitary and metropolitan councils plus six mayors.
Voting in the 2025 local elections will cover local government elections, parish council elections, local authority mayoral elections, combined authority mayoral elections and combined county authority mayoral elections.
Not every UK resident will have a local election to attend, however. Elections will take place across 14 county councils: Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Devon, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire.
The remaining are unitary authorities of: Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Durham, North Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, West Northamptonshire and Wiltshire, plus Doncaster Metropolitan Council.
Here is a guide to the local elections in May, with an interactive map, full list of the scheduled polls and details of the votes to watch out for.
On top of the council seats, there are six mayoral elections including four combined authority mayors in Greater Lincolnshire, Hull and East Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, West of England, plus two Metropolitan Borough Mayors in Doncaster and North Tyneside.
Plus, voters living in the constituency of Runcorn and Helsby, in Cheshire, will choose a new MP after former MP Mike Amesbury stood down after being given a prison sentence for assaulting a constituent.
The 2025 local elections will be on a smaller scale than usual for this point in the electoral cycle because scheduled votes in nine English council areas have been postponed until 2026. The controversial delay has been ordered to allow time for a reorganisation of local authorities. Also, no local elections are taking place in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
In terms of council control it is the Conservatives who have the most to lose as the Tories currently hold 19 of the 23 councils which are being contested. Two councils are under No Overall Control, one is run by Independents with Labour holding Doncaster, the only metropolitan council where an election is being held.
Most of the councils holding elections were last contested in May 2021, which was an electoral high point for the Conservatives as the then prime minister Boris Johnson benefited from a ‘vaccine bounce’ in a turning point for the fight against Covid.
Since then the Tories have been trounced by Labour in the General Election and seen supporters and councillors defect in large numbers to Reform UK.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has admitted her party faced an ‘extremely difficult’ challenge in this year’s local elections. If the results of the General Election were replicated on May 1, the Tories could lose control of many of the town halls it gained in 2021.
