Discussions around changing the voting system often refer to Westminster, yet the same problems that stifle the government of the UK apply at a much more local level. Just like in Parliament, councils across England and Wales use the First Past the Post system, or slight variations of it. And just like in Parliament, councils rarely reflect how their local residents voted.
The 2022 local elections in Lewisham, for instance, saw Labour win every single councillor on just over half the vote. The same year, also in London, the Conservatives won 70.0% of seats on Kensington & Chelsea Council, from 44% of votes and the Liberal Democrats won 89% of seats on St Albans Council, in Hertfordshire, from 48% of votes.
At the Electoral Reform Society, we want to see local councils that more closely reflect how their local areas voted – a party on half the vote should get roughly half the seats. This isn’t just an issue of fairness to all the residents who aren’t being represented currently, though; it would have a real impact on how our local councils function.
Local councils should be responsive to voters
When local councils don’t reflect how local people voted, changes to how people vote don’t always have an impact on the council.
Democracy works when elections function as a feedback loop between voters and their representatives. If the streets are getting cleaner and the quality of social care is improving in your local area, the party in charge might expect to increase their vote share and win more councillors to continue their good work. Likewise, if there are piles of fly-tipped waste on every corner and constant scandals at the council, their vote share might drop, and they start to lose councillors
But this isn’t how First Past the Post works.
To get elected under First Past the Post, the candidate needs to get one more vote than the person in second place. Say your area is improving and your councillor’s vote share increases – but as they have already won, this increase makes no difference to the make-up of the council. Say your neighbourhood is getting worse and their vote share goes down – as long as they still have one vote more than the person in second place, this drop in support also makes no difference.
Rather than a responsive ebb and flow, you get parties that slowly hollow out support before collapsing. While it might feel satisfying for their opponents, replacing one tranche of experienced councillors all at once with a whole new set of inexperienced ones inevitably will impact how the council functions.
Councillors shouldn’t mark their own homework
The other impact of one party winning the bulk of seats on a minority of the vote, is that councillors scrutinise each other on council decisions and annual budgets. When the scrutiny committee is dominated by councillors of the same party as the people they are scrutinising, there is little incentive to look too deeply into councillors’ behaviour.
Likewise, while it might be easy to pass a council budget when one party is in overall control, there is little incentive for that budget to be properly scrutinised. We are not talking about small sums of money here either; Birmingham City Council set a £4.4 billion budget in 2026, and even smaller councils are spending hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Councils need enough opposition councillors to properly scrutinise this spending.
The tried and tested alternative
In local elections across England and Wales, some people live in wards that elect a single councillor while others have two or three. Yet, due to First Past the Post the same party will typically pick up all the seats. What if, rather than going to the single party with the most votes, these seats represented the spread of opinion in the ward? A councillor who is doing a good job and saw their vote share increase could get a colleague from the same party elected to carry on their work. Likewise, if a party were losing support, they could go down from two to one councillor – without having to wait for their party to collapse off a cliff.
This is how local elections have worked in Scotland since 2007. They use a system called the Single Transferable Vote that means the political make-up of councils change in response to voters, and councillors have to work together for their local area, rather than rubberstamping a budget from one party.
The question is why England and Wales should continue to settle for less.
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