The elves at LDV have been busy digging into the results to bring you a full list of all the Councils in England where Lib Dems made gains. Please let us know if they have made any errors.
So here they are. We have highlighted the ones where we are now in control.
- Arun (where we are the largest party under NOC)
- Barnsley
- Basingstoke & Deane
- Bassetlaw
- Bath & North East Somerset
- Bedford (where we are the largest party under NOC, and we retained the elected Mayor)
- Blaby
- Blackburn with Darwen
- Bolsover
- Bolton
- Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole
- Bracknell Forest
- Brentwood
- Broadland
- Bromsgrove
- Broxtowe
- Burnley
- Bury
- Calderdale
- Cambridge
- Cannock Chase
- Canterbury
- Central Bedfordshire
- Chelmsford
- Cherwell
- Cheshire East
- Cheshire West & Chester
- Chesterfield
- Chichester
- Colchester
- Cotswold
- Dacorum
- Derby
- Derbyshire Dales
- Dorset
- East Cambridgeshire
- East Devon
- East Hampshire
- East Hertfordshire
- East Riding of Yorkshire
- East Suffolk
- Eastbourne
- Eastleigh
- Eden
- Elmbridge
- Epping Forest
- Epsom & Ewell
- Erewash
- Exeter
- Folkestone & Hythe
- Gateshead
- Gedling
- Guildford
- Halton
- Hambleton
- Harborough
- Hart
- Herefordshire
- Hertsmere
- High Peak
- Hinckley & Bosworth
- Horsham
- Ipswich
- King’s Lynn & West Norfolk
- Kirklees
- Lancaster
- Leeds
- Liverpool
- Luton
- Malvern Hills
- Manchester
- Mendip (where we are the largest party under NOC)
- Mid Devon
- Mid Suffolk
- Mid Sussex
- Milton Keynes
- Mole Valley
- New Forest
- Newark & Sherwood
- Newcastle-upon-Tyne
- North Devon
- North East Derbyshire
- North Hertfordshire
- North Norfolk
- North Somerset
- North West Leicestershire
- Oadby & Wigston
- Pendle
- Peterborough
- Portsmouth (where we are the largest party under NOC)
- Preston
- Reading
- Redcar & Cleveland
- Reigate & Banstead
- Ribble Valley
- Richmondshire
- Rother
- Runnymede
- Rushcliffe
- Rushmoor
- Rutland (Lord Bonkers will be pleased)
- Sedgemoor
- Sevenoaks
- Sheffield
- Solihull
- Somerset West & Taunton
- South Gloucestershire
- South Hams
- South Kesteven
- South Lakeland
- South Norfolk
- South Oxfordshire (where we are the largest party under NOC)
- South Ribble
- South Somerset
- Southend-on-Sea
- Spelthorne
- St Albans (where we are the largest party under NOC)
- St Helens
- Stevenage
- Stockport (where we have the same number of seats as Labour under NOC)
- Stockton-on-Tees
- Stratford-on-Avon
- Sunderland
- Surrey Heath
- Swale
- Tandridge
- Teignbridge
- Tendring
- Test Valley
- Tewkesbury
- Three Rivers
- Tonbridge & Malling
- Torbay
- Trafford
- Tunbridge Wells
- Uttlesford
- Vale of White Horse
- Wakefield
- Warwick
- Waverley
- Wealden
- Welwyn Hatfield
- West Lindsey
- West Oxfordshire
- Winchester
- Windsor & Maidenhead Royal
- Wirral
- Woking
- Wokingham
- Worthing
- Wychavon
- York (where we are the largest party under NOC)
And we continue to hold Watford with the same number of seats as before.
Huge congratulations to the campaign teams in all those areas.
And, of course, we still have Lib Dem councillors in a number of other councils where we did not increase the number of seats. Sadly, a handful of our councillors lost their seats – that must be particularly difficult to bear amongst all the celebrations.
You can view all the results in England in at-a-glance format here.
We are also watching our sister party, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI), and will report when all the results are in. At the moment they have gained 13 seats at the expense of the DUP, UUP and SDLP, but 149 seats are still to be declared.
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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21 Comments
The gains in Thursday’s electons were a fantastic result. The BBC analysis puts national vote shares at 28% for Labour and Conservatives and 19% for Libdems.
In the May 2017 local elections, the projected national voteshare was 38% for the Conservatives, 27% for Labour and 18% for the Liberal Democrats.
The May 2018 elections in London and elsewhere showed The BBC’s estimate put Labour on 35% of the vote (up 8% since 2017), the Conservatives on 35% (down 3%), the Liberal Democrats on 16% (down 2%).
Gains from Consrvatives outweighthose from Labour by 2 to 1. While Brexit may have been an issue for some voters, I think one of the key takeaways from these elections is the decline in dominance of the two larger parties since the 2015 elections and the return of the Libdems to the headlines as the third force in national politics.
Running councils and delivering for residents will be a tough job in many resource constrained local councils. As a party we will need to be able to do all we can to ensure thar councils have access to adequate funding to meet their needs.
We gained 11 seats in West Berkshire not quite enough to deprive the Tories of their majority but still a very good result.
Particular congratulations to those places breaking through for the first time, a number of councils now have Lib Dem representation after quite a long gap or indeed not all, places like Bracknell, Bolsover, Erewash, Kings Lynn and others too, no gain is easy and let’s hope these might be springboards for future success. Does the party have a strategy for supporting this?
Our friends in the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland have good results. BBC reports:
DUP 91 – 9
SF 78 + 1
UUP 62 – 7
APNI 41 + 17
SDLP 45 – 3
GREEN 6 +2
These are all provincial parties. Other smaller parties exist.
An openly gay woman has been allowed to stand for the DUP and been elected.
My friends in Southend re-took the only Tory seat in the three member Leigh ward. Although there have been occasional Tory interlopers before, there has been at least one Lib Dem/ Liberal councillor in this ward unbroken since 1967. Is this a record?
Wonderful to see Southend-on-Sea on this list; our first gains since 2010, 3 brilliant new councillors gaining 3 wards from the Conservatives!!! 🙂
A missed opportunity in Waverley where LibDems were beguiled by Compass and something called a “progessive alliance” into failing to field a full slate in many wards thus ceding to other parties seats which they should have won. In Godalming, for example, they picked up five seats when they might well have taken all ten.
I normally hate just reading a really long list of places…..
….. but this one is so much fun!
@nick In Godalming, for example, they picked up five seats when they might well have taken all ten.
Maybe. Or more likely, lost 9 or all 10 to the tories, like the last 3 local elections.
I’ve seen figures showing that the areas contested on Thursday voted 56/44 for Brexit in 2016 – significantly higher than the 52/48 country as a whole. So much for the idea that our Peoples Vote policy will stop us winning in Leave areas.
Having a quick look at the results we have done well against the Tories less well with Labour, especially the north. By ‘sitting on the fence’ Labour are holding their position. When they come off the fence they will loose one side or the other.It suits them to drag it out as long as possible. If Corbyn and May do a deal what happens then.? We must be ready for more than one scenario.
@Tony H
The Liberal Democrats did well at this election and deserve to be congratulated, but you really should not turn it into something it isnt.
Turn out at the Referendum was 72.2% turn out at these local elections were 36.3%
I would suggest millions of leave voters like me refused to vote at these local elections because I refused to allow the parties to use my vote as an endorsement on their brexit policy, which is exactly what parties and the media have been doing.
Had the Brexit party been running candidates at these elections I suspect the results would have been very different indeed.
Nobody wants to detract from how well the Liberal Democrats did in these elections, but if you turn it into something it wasn’t, i.e claiming that this is an endorsement of exit from brexit, all that will achieve is getting peoples backs up and I suspect will be counter productive.
I am glad that the Liberal Democrats did well in these elections, we need a variety of healthy parties that give people a real choice and who are able to hold Governments to account.
I hope this new found strength in the party will not be wasted, with great power comes great responsibility and the party should now be using this to propel its policies on education, welfare reforms, NHS, mental health to name but a few.
There is a very good chance that the next General Election will result in another hung parliament, which will hopefully see the Tories booted out.
Liberal Democrats, Labour, Snp etc should be strengthening their policies, so should the time come, there are area’s of agreement to build upon in any future co-operations.
If Liberal Democrats continue to make this all about brexit, then I fear that they will not reap any dividends in future elections.
@ Jenny Barnes: More likely? No, very unlikely! In two wards, Labour candidates were “elected” with less than half the votes of their LibDem allies. In two others Tories were undeservedly re-elected because Labour candidates failed to match the performance of their LibDem or Green allies.
A sub-optimal result in Waverley: in Godalming especially.
Labour in some wards .in Leeds stretched the truth by saying that we were in coalition in 2009 and that as such we had bad educational standards (Ofsted). That was in 2009 when Labour had 61 0f the 99 seats available. Disingenuous comments (lies) can be believed by voters who do not follow politics which can effect the vote. The party has to put effort into confronting the problems that the North has to make inroads into the area.
We have now got to do our utmost to HOLD the seats and show we are better at delivering services AND fight austerity of the Govnt to make them relax the purse strings. By winning the seats this may happen but we must ensure that we take the credit.
@nigel hunter
Quite a lot of these are in the North – Liverpool, Manchester, Sunderland (where they took a hammering in some wards). I am not quite sure what qualifies as the “North”!
The BBC website says: “Support for the major parties fell more heavily in their heartlands, according to Prof Curtice, with Tories losing most seats in the south of England and Labour in the north.”
My reading is that Labour did fairly horrendously in their heartlands. Remember they were starting on a low base of 29% in 2015. 28% is their second lowest since 2010 apart from 2017 before the Corbyn bandwagon started to roll for the General.
Remember also that something like three-quarters of the seats being fought were in districts or smaller unitaries. Labour were making some 70 losses early on in the night and these would be mainly in the big mets as they are the first to declare. Something like 10% of their seats.
There are some wards where you do weigh the Labour vote so loss of vote share may not show up as a loss of a seat. And in SOME they may have lost out to other parties other than us.
—
Whether or not we run the council – we should be campaigning very hard for more money for our local council from central government – “a fair deal for X”
Correction: in one ward, the “successful” Labour candidate received just over half the votes of the LibDem.
@matt,
I am not saying people voted for us because of our Brexit stance. I’m saying that our Brexit stance did not STOP people in Leave areas voting for us. That is a very different point.
This is something that has often been discussed here on LDV over the last couple of years: some people saying the LibDems should not be pushing the Peoples Vote message so much because it will alienate potential voters in Leave areas. I’ve always disagreed with that, and my post earlier is just drawing attention to the evidence. Our position on Brexit didn’t stop us making gains in Leave areas on Thursday. I’m sure those gains were more to do with our local campaigns than our Remainism, but our Remainism has clearly not been a block on attracting votes. That’s my point.
Agreed generally a very good set of results.
However, we should also be looking at what went wrong in areas where we lost seats to try and understand and learn from those defeats. While Ashfield seems to have a unique set of circumstances, what went wrong in Lewes, where we used to have an MP?
@Tony
I understand where your’re coming from, but how much was the gains down to the fact that many leave inclined voters decided to stay at home and not bother to vote because they did not want parties and the media using their vote as an endorsement for their stance on brexit? I know many people who felt that way and withheld their vote for those reasons.
It is very telling for me, just how many independents were elected in these elections which seems to be going very unreported.
The Brexit party did not put up any candidates in this election, I suspect that had they of done, we could have seen a very different set of results in these elections.
I believe people are learning all the wrong lessons from these results to suit their own views
I don’t want people to misconstrue my comments and think I am not happy for the Liberal Democrats, I am, I think this is a good thing and wish to see the party get back to being the fighting force that it used to be in politics on a whole range of issues and not just Brexit.
We need strong opposition parties to hold the government to account and in order to build consensus amongst each other in order to bring about changes that this country needs, not just on Brexit.
I suspect the Euros in a couple of weeks is going to paint a very different picture on the countries overall feelings towards the EU and we will see the Brexit Party coming out as the largest party.
What would happen if we have another referendum? Well I am more inclined to believe now after these local elections, Peter Martins predictions of late, that we will see an extremely low turn out and leavers will boycott the poll. How would that have democratic legitimacy were that to happen? it certainly is not going to heal a divided nation.
With a General Election, looking more and more likely sometime this year, opposition parties should now be strengthening their policies on a whole range of issues and reaching out to people once more and hopefully building a consensus amongst the parties for cooperation, should the situation occur where it is needed in coalition or confidence and supply.
If Liberal Democrats do not learn this lesson quick and start capitalising on this momentum to reach out to people once more, I am afraid no amount of new councillors or foot soldiers is going to make a jot of difference at the next general election in getting more LD Mps elected.
Thankyou matt.
I’m quite sure that some voters did stay at home for that reason. Yet we still made significant gains. But campaigning is about making those kind of decisions; often you know that a particular stance will lose you some votes but you calculate that it will gain others.
I too want the party to develop many policies, and to be fair I think we are doing that. But strategically, there are two hard realities: 1. we as a party get very little opportunity to be on the media at all, and 2. currently the issue of Brexit dominates everything. So, given we have a clear and popular policy on the big issue of the day, it makes sense to make it our central message. Also, talking about Brexit doesn’t mean we are talking about just the EU. Brexit is about jobs, about businesses, about the environment, about education, about the economy and public investment, about culture and immigration. We need to explain WHY we want a PV (including the fact we know that VoteLeave broke the law and used Russian influence!)
I’m sure you are right that the Brexit party will do well in the Euros, probably the largest party. There’s not much we can do about that – that block of hardline Brexit voters does exist and Farage is very good at getting them.
What we did this week, all over the country, was set out our stall and give the voters reasons to vote LD. Our Brexit stance was part of that. Even if it put some folk off, the fact is we still made huge progress, so it was clearly no impediment to success – even in Leave areas.
Oh and finally, I’m passionate about staying in the EU, so I would be in favour of us saying that all day every day, even if it does cost us votes.