Opinium’s 2025 Local Election Hub
The 2025 local elections are the first big electoral test for Keir Starmer as Prime Minister and Kemi Badenoch as Leader of the Opposition. They will also reveal how firmly the Lib Dems might hold onto gains from the last general election and whether Reform UK can turn polling numbers into wins at a local level.
To help businesses, media, policymakers – and everyone in between – make sense of this year’s local elections, we’ve launched Opinium’s 2025 Local Election Dashboard. It gives a clear snapshot of which councils are up for election, the current political makeup, and where the key battlegrounds are.
The first port of call is looking at the current map of England. We have focused on England simply because there are no council elections in any other home country. As you can see, these are predominantly county councils and unitary authorities, which typically cover rural or suburban areas. The only borough holding elections this May is Doncaster.
The postponement of elections in many parts of the country also means that this year’s elections are even more disproportionately focused on the Midlands.
We can also look at the current political composition of local government in England another way: rather than geographically, we have plotted all councils in England by type and by the current proportion of Conservative councillors.
While this layout may not work for future local elections, all but four of the councils up for election this May are Conservative-controlled, so it feels like a sensible way to lay things out. They do very much feel like the last redoubts of Conservative-run local government.
If, as expected, the Conservatives lose many councillors in May, you will see these councils shift leftward on the chart—turning red for Labour-controlled, yellow for Lib Dem-controlled, or black for no overall control. We might even see our first Reform-controlled council, although that still seems a stretch at this stage.
Why a Reform-controlled council seems unlikely is partly because a party needs to win over half of the seats on the council to take overall control – just like a government needs to win an overall majority in the House of Commons.
The table below allows you to explore how these councils voted at the last general election, which is the only electoral benchmark we have that includes Reform as a major political force in these areas. Since many national polls now show them vying for first or second place, it makes more sense to use the last general election as the benchmark, rather than relying on 2021 local election vote shares, which now feel a world away from the current political landscape.