The last few years have been extraordinary for Liberal Democrats in local government. We have taken control of councils we hadn’t held in a generation, broken Conservative dominance in places that looked permanent, and built a base of councillors larger than at any point in recent memory. The May 2024 general election was the visible peak, but the local story has been running longer and deeper.

Now comes the harder part. Winning is one thing. Running things well, year after year, in a way that makes residents glad they voted for us and councillors proud of what they’ve built, takes more.

I’ve been thinking about this from a particular angle: how we work together when we deliver. The culture inside a Liberal Democrat council group shapes everything that comes out of it, and we don’t talk about it enough.

The group is the engine

Most of what residents see is the leader, the cabinet or portfolio holders, and the policies. Most of what makes those things possible is invisible. The group meetings, the WhatsApp threads, the corridor conversations, the informal conventions about who gets heard and who doesn’t. A council group is a working community of dozens of people, often with very different backgrounds, who have to make collective decisions under pressure for four years at a stretch.

Every group has good weeks and bad weeks, and the difference shows in how the administration operates. When the group is working well, messaging holds together, scrutiny is sharper, and people bring problems to the room rather than nursing them quietly. When it isn’t, the administration carries the cost.

What a liberal group culture looks like

We are Liberal Democrats. Our values should describe how we treat each other, not just sit in a manifesto.

In practice, that means a few things. Everyone’s voice should be heard without their having to shout. Good decisions don’t always come from the loudest voice in the room, and a group that defaults to volume rather than reflection misses the quieter people who have loads to contribute.

It means transparency among colleagues. Councillors should know what is happening, what is stuck, and what is coming in time to form considered opinions. A group where information flows freely is a group that can trust itself with hard decisions.

It means problems surface early. Liberal democracy works on the assumption that disagreement, surfaced and worked through, produces better decisions than consensus enforced from above. That principle should apply inside our own groups as much as in the chambers where we sit.

And it means treating new councillors as colleagues from day one. We have just elected a cohort of new Lib Dem councillors who have never served before. How they are inducted, supported, and listened to in their first six months will shape the kind of councillors they become for the next four years and beyond.

Where policy lives

Whether a Lib Dem group has won every seat, just enough for control, or sits as a minority, policy discussion belongs in the group. Other parties are far more centralised. A small leadership clique decides, the rest fall in line. We work differently, and we should be proud of it. Real debate among councillors, before decisions are made, is one of the things that makes a Lib Dem council distinctively Lib Dem. It also produces better decisions.

Why it matters now

The political weather is volatile. Reform is rising, the Conservatives are reorganising, and the public’s patience with all of us is shorter than it has ever been. Liberal Democrat councils need to be visibly, demonstrably better than the alternatives, on outcomes and on conduct alike. Voters who chose us in protest will choose someone else in protest if we look like everyone else.

That’s a hard standard. A leadership team can’t meet it alone. It requires every member of every Lib Dem group to feel that they are part of something worth being part of, that their work is seen, and that they have a real stake in what their council becomes.

The starting point

Most council groups elect new leadership in the days after a local election. It is the moment when the next four years’ culture is set, often without anyone noticing. The choices made in those rooms, how decisions get made, what kind of operating style is rewarded, echo through the term.

I would urge every Lib Dem group going through that process this month to think hard about culture as well as competence. Who in your group makes others better? Who listens before speaking? Who can hold the team together through hard decisions and visible setbacks?

Those are the questions that will shape whether your council is one residents still trust in four years’ time.

We have won the right to run things. Now we have to be worth it.

* Tom Reeve is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Kingston upon Thames