First Past the Post again set to produce random results at English local elections

With four weeks to go before English local authority elections, which will be held on 1 May 2025, this week saw the announcement of candidates for each of the divisions or wards where local councillors will be elected.

This year will see a smaller number of councillors elected compared to recent rounds of English local elections, partly due to the postponement of some elections as a result of the UK government’s English devolution and local government reorganisation proposals.

However, elections are still taking place in 23 local authorities (14 county councils; 8 unitary authorities; 1 metropolitan borough). Around 1,650 councillors will be elected across these councils, in what will be the biggest test of the electoral temperature at the ballot box since the UK general election of July 2024.

Unfortunately, as with UK general elections, the voting system that is used for English local authority elections is First Past The Past (FPTP).

As we saw at the 2024 UK general election, First Past the Post can produce results that far from properly reflect how people have voted, indeed last year’s UK general election saw the most disproportional outcome in history.

There are numerous examples of First Past the Post also causing highly disproportional results in English local government over recent years.

First Past the Post means we don’t get the councils we vote for

For example, in May 2022, Labour won every single seat on Lewisham Council, in London, from just over half (52.2%) of votes. Almost half of the votes cast were for other parties, yet they received zero representation in the council chamber. This is clearly a perverse outcome, one that leads to a lack of scrutiny of the council, but a majority of voters did vote Labour.

The same year, also in London, the Conservatives won 70.0% of seats on Kensington & Chelsea Council, from 43.9% of votes. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats won 89.3% of seats on St Albans Council, in Hertfordshire, from 47.9% of votes.

How are voters supposed to influence the decisions of their local council, when changing who they vote for does not necessarily have an impact on who gets elected?

In multi-member divisions or wards, you can end up with the ridiculous situation of all three councillors being representatives of the same party, despite more than half of the votes in that area going to other parties.

Under First Past the Post, all votes not cast for the one (or multiple) winners in each division or ward go to waste. Spread across a whole council area, parties can often secure a substantial number of votes and still be left with zero representation. For example, the Green Party got 21.9% of votes across Lewisham, in 2022, yet zero councillors.

Rather than simply representing the strength of support for the different parties in their area, as councils in Scotland and Northern Ireland do, England’s councils often look wildly different from their local communities and the votes of those who live there.

There is a tried and tested alternative

There is a clear alternative to the unfair results we have seen in England. Both Scotland and Northern Ireland use the fairer Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system, avoiding the distorted and random results produced by First Past the Post. STV is a form of proportional representation that can breathe new life and energy into our local democracy.

Since STV was introduced in Scotland in 2007, one-party fiefdoms have become a thing of the past. The 2022 results for Edinburgh, Fife and Glasgow (see below) clearly show how councils in Scotland bear a much closer resemblance to how local people voted. It is now rare in Scotland for one party to win a majority of seats in a council chamber, from a minority of votes, meaning councillors have to work across party divides to deliver services for local people.

With STV, voters would live in divisions or wards with one or more councillors, just like many people in England already do. Except, rather than the norm being that one party can dominate, often on the basis of relatively low vote shares, you get a group of councillors that reflect the diversity of local opinion. Ensuring everyone is represented, your council budget is properly scrutinised, and you have multiple people and parties to ask for help from on local issues.

Proportional representation would mean fairer results at local elections and would create council chambers that better reflect the way people voted.

We will be keeping a close eye on the results as they come in next month and will again highlight where First Past the Post has resulted in council chambers that do not properly reflect how local people have voted.