A Little Local Difficulty

ENGLISH LOCAL GOVERNMENT is littered with examples of national government visiting retribution on councils for perceived transgressions and threats to its power, most famously, Margaret Thatcher’s government abolishing the Metropolitan Councils and Ken Livingstone’s GLC in 1986 for getting too big for their boots.

As they survey England’s rapidly changing political landscape, some in government may question the wisdom of further devolution, given that this will increasingly involve the empowerment of local leaders of other political parties. In particular, in the new multi-party landscape (running at five, for the moment, with quite similar shares of the vote in some places) the Reform UK party’s overall average share of the votes cast across all 23 councils where elections took place on May 1st was no more than 31%, but victory can come in those circumstances from achieving only a quarter or third of the vote.

Whatever your view of its politics, there can be no doubt that Reform UK performed remarkably well as this new reality played out in the local elections held two weeks ago. The party won most votes, most seats and won overall control of most of the councils being contested. No party in recent years has ‘come from nowhere’ to have such a dramatic effect at local government level.

Its tally of 677 council seats represented 41% of all those being contested, which helped the party win control of 10 councils and a significant stake in four more with No Overall Control, where it emerged as the largest party. This is something that Reform’s predecessor, UKIP, never managed at the height of its popularity in the run up to the 2015 general election and Brexit poll. Reform also captured two of the four combined authority mayors that were contested, on either side of the Humber, whilst there is a new Conservative mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, as well as a successor Labour mayor of the West of England Combined authority.

The fact that 11 of the 12 powerful Combined Authority mayors were from the Labour Party prior to this election had certainly made it easier for ministers to treat these regional leaders as partners rather than rivals, with the Teesside Conservative Ben Houchen alone carrying the flag for the opposition parties. The latest elections mean Houchen is now joined by three other non-Labour mayors. The dynamic will clearly be different from now on at Council of the Regions, set up by Prime Minister Kier Starmer and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner to bring together the centre and the provinces, and any other mayoral get-togethers.

Fortunately for the Labour Government, none of its existing nine mayors - six of them in Metropolitan areas - are up for election for at least two more years, though the constituent councils in many of their areas will be. Reform is already setting its sights on the 2026 elections in Wales and Scotland. “If they think this year is bad, wait until they see us next year in Wales,” a senior Reform source warned. Indeed, it is salutary to imagine what would have happened to Labour’s local and regional power base if more urban councils and mayors had been up for election this time.

At the local authority level, meanwhile, the key question for Reform in power now is whether its councils can deliver the change promised to voters. As its leader Nigel Farage admitted last week: “The biggest risk is succeeding... and then not delivering”. He has promised to deliver an Elon Musk-style DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) review of spending and resource deployment in every Reform-controlled local authority.

A party strategist told Politics Home they have already offered their services to some of Reform’s new councillors. “Part of my business is making sure people stay elected and teaching them how to act as an elected official. So, a lot of them I[m going to take on, to build the party’s image and make sure we do actually have professional people working in the party,” they explained.

On the net zero crusade, which Reform committed to resisting after the local election results, a Government minister was quoted as saying they had “a lot of sympathy” with former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s recent sceptical comments and suggested that there are rumours of a reshuffle that might affect the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).

There is a potential tension emerging between Reform being a small-state party offering tax cuts at a national level, and one that appeals locally to more left leaning voters who want broken public services fixed. It could begin to reflect the same kind of differences found by varying breeds of Lib Dems around the country displaying chameleon-like characteristics in different areas.

“You cannot reach net zero on the backs of working people,” they said. “We all need to do our recycling. We all need to be conscious of making small journeys and walking where we can… but ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, that is not going to make a blind bit of difference, and therefore we need to actually be going after those people who are the big polluters, who are going to make a difference.”

There are signs some Labour MPs are starting to agree. A Red Wall Labour MP said that people need to see the “tangible benefits” of net zero faster, and that it would be “potentially very toxic” to quickly transition to electric vehicles if it puts jobs at risk. “The abstract stuff about saving the planet 40 years down the line, great, but it’s the jobs that will be created getting there that are more important,” they said.

They added that the Government should be wary of taking a tone of “we know best” on issues such as net zero, explaining that a “moralising tone” on climate issues “really rubs people up the wrong way”. “We’ve got to be really careful of giving off a vibe that we’re not listening and we’re just ploughing ahead,” they warned.

“I agree with the general direction the Government’s setting but we know from Brexit, that people really kick against this idea of ‘all the experts know best’, and that worries me. Reform has got this anti-net zero vibe going on, and there’s a risk that that could play out the same way as Brexit.”

For those whose main concern is more detailed transport matters at either a local or national level, the prospects may be less traumatic. Reform is still a weak voice at Westminster and many of its 2024 General Election manifesto policies for transport will be largely irrelevant for a 2029 general election. Most of the cost and engineering works of HS2 they would like to scrap will be built, electric cars could have reached adoption levels and price parity with traditional ones by then. Even for the next London mayoral election, ULEZ would have run its course as few pre-2015 diesel cars let alone pre-2004 petrol ones would be on the region’s roads.

At the local level, buses are in favour similarly amongst all the parties, and even if Reform were to be ‘keen on roads’ (which is not at all clear) finances are hardly flowing to build them, and the apparent priority for any ‘spare’ money will surely be maintenance to tackle potholes. There is, meanwhile, a potential tension emerging between Reform being a small-state party offering tax cuts at a national level, and one that appeals locally to more left leaning voters who want broken public services fixed. It could begin to reflect the same kind of differences found by varying breeds of Lib Dems around the country displaying chameleon-like characteristics in different areas.

And will Reform really be able to find and expose so-called waste? The gap created by the end of the Audit Commission regime in 2015, with a governance gap since then, has resulted in many councils’ accounts not being signed off. The big strategic mistakes of misplaced property investment and energy generation schemes have mostly been found out, and the culprit councils put in special measures already. Meanwhile, over a decade of salami-slicing of budgets due to austerity will leave scant pickings in terms of staffing cuts. Labour too is on the act, announcing in April its own plan to set up a Local Audit Office.

Nonetheless, there are elements of transport that could see policy reversals. Reform has called for a ban of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTN), 15 minute cities and restrictive 20mph speed limits. But this only mirrors the Conservative’s Plan for Drivers of 2023. And DfT officials found challenges there in defining what an LTN actually is, and what would be grounds to block them. Meanwhile, detailed work at local level still saw schemes implemented, though the courts continue to be involved as we report again in this issue. Lower speed limits have proved popular in many communities once bedded in, so reversing them may alienate some of Reform’s voters.

When it comes to cycling, existing policies at many councils are already advanced while there is often strong support for modest schemes to benefit cyclists. Farage did lash out in the local election campaign at “cycle lanes that no one uses” while Reform’s likely leader of Worcestershire county council claimed: “All the other parties have bent over backwards to please a small minority.” Though, at the same time, he was happy to emphasise that Reform was eager to support bus travel, a hot issue in many areas where Reform’s voter base has tended to be older. Improving bus services in an era of tight spending may prove a challenge, though, unless bus priorities can be provided and parking management accepted as a quid pro quo to increase reliability and performance.

One key issue in this interesting set of circumstances is perhaps to recognise that some 600-plus Reform councillors elected two weeks ago are new to local government duties - and probably didn’t even expect to win their seats. Perhaps they will welcome and appreciate support in getting their heads round knotty local transport problems and solutions and understanding difficult trade-offs. A useful offer would be understanding some of the tools and techniques that their experienced transport planning and traffic officers have to offer.

Would someone care to organise that?

In the best British democratic traditions, the best approach might be to give these newcomers a chance – and empathise with the situation that they face, rather than looking on them as unwelcome pariahs and no hopers.

Peter Stonham is the Editorial Director of TAPAS Network

This article was first published in LTT magazine, LTT915, 15 May 2025.