Each week, usually on a Thursday, a number of local council by-elections take place around Britain. As with UK parliamentary by-elections, these take place when a representative either resigns or dies and there is a vacancy to be filled. On 11 September 2025, six local by-elections took place across England and Wales.
The outcomes in five of these contests highlight something we have identified at regular intervals over the last couple of years: the First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system is not fit for purpose in our age of multi-party politics and is producing random results. First Past the Post is a disservice to voters.
The striking fact is that of the six by-elections that took place on 11 September, in five of them the winning candidate takes their place in a council chamber with the support of fewer than one-third of the voters in that election. In two of the contests, the winning candidate’s vote share was under 30%.
- Newmarket East (West Suffolk) – Reform UK (29.7%)
- Wilmslow Lacey Green (Cheshire East) – Conservatives (29.8%)
- Stotfold (Central Bedfordshire) – Reform UK (30.8%)
- Illtyd (Vale of Glamorgan) – Reform UK (31.3%)
- Talbot & Branskome (Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole) – Liberal Democrats (32.4%)
This is not the fault of the individual councillors elected; they have to compete in the system as it is. However, that system is clearly producing perverse outcomes when the views of over two-thirds of voters are regularly being completely ignored.
Local elections that are fit for purpose
It does not have to be this way. Local elections in two nations of the UK, Scotland and Northern Ireland, are conducted using the Single Transferable Vote (STV), a system of proportional representation where voters rank candidates in order of preference.
When standard local elections take place in Scotland, between two and five councillors are elected to represent each ward. The proportional nature of the system means that the representatives elected to serve each ward far better reflect the political balance of views of voters in that area than is the case in England and Wales.
At local council level in Scotland, it is vanishingly rare to see single parties win underserved majorities of council seats, when they lack majority support within that area. This is far removed from the situation in England, under First Past The Post, as we saw at the local elections in May 2025, when single parties won overall majorities on multiple councils, despite receiving the backing of fewer than 40% of voters.
How Scottish by-elections work
If a Scottish councillor resigns or dies, a by-election takes place to elect one replacement. Voters rank as many or as few candidates as they like, in the same way as they do under the Single Transferable Vote. If no candidate wins over half the votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and the votes that had gone to them are moved to each voter’s second preference.
This process continues until a candidate achieves the support of over half of people who voted or only one candidate is left. An example of this occurred in a Scottish by-election, on 26 June 2025, in the Fountainbridge & Craiglockhart ward of City of Edinburgh Council.
The first preference vote shares for the top six candidates were as follows and are a prime example of the multi-party world that British politics has now entered.
- Labour: 20.8%
- Liberal Democrats: 20.4%
- Green Party: 18.2%
- Scottish National Party: 14.5%
- Conservatives: 13.8%
- Reform UK: 7.9%
If this local by-election had occurred in England, under First Past the Post, then the Labour candidate would have been elected with the backing of just over one-fifth of voters. Almost 80% of voters would have been ignored.
Fortunately, the preferential system used in the Scottish context meant that the views of a wider portion of voters was taken into account and the winning candidate took up their place in the council chamber with the backing of a much more solid 54.8% of voters who turned out, once the preferences of each of the eliminated candidates had been transferred.
The graph below, from Ballot Box Scotland, shows how the vote transfers process unfolded, with the Liberal Democrats candidate emerging as the winner after all votes had been transferred.