This week we’ve been delving into the English local election results to understand what’s happening behind the headlines, and the picture that is emerging is a mixed one.
Whilst the general talk is about winners and losers from the elections – and there is no question that the electoral system that served the two largest parties so well has turned into a threat to them – the real story exists within individual council contests. Here the fragmenting of the party system is having wildly different effects in different places, with real consequences for voters in how their choices are turned into representation. The lottery elections that we have long predicted are here.
Fragmentation – what does it mean under First Past the Post
There are, of course, plenty of examples of disproportional results, where one party has managed to scoop up a significant majority of seats on sometimes as little as a third, or even less, of the votes. This is typical of a lot of local elections under First Past the Post – one party often takes all three seats in a multi-member ward, despite not getting close to a majority of votes in the ward and goes on to win majority control of the council. With more parties in play, those winning vote shares get even smaller.
It is also not unusual to see ‘wrong winner’ elections, where the party with the most votes across the council area does not end up with the most seats. This year Wandsworth delivered such a result with the Conservatives gaining more seats than Labour on a lower vote share. The opposite happened in Croydon where Labour was the ‘wrong winner’ in the council chamber, though this was somewhat negated by the Conservatives retaining the Croydon elected mayor, on a very low vote share of 30.7%, just one percentage point ahead of the Labour candidate.
First Past the Snakes and First up the Ladders
But other dynamics are now in play as the party system fragments and the results get ever more random. We are used to the First Past the Post system bonus which sees parties get far more seats than their vote share, creating those disproportional results. Correspondingly there’s the First Past the Post system penalty in which other parties get far fewer seats than their vote share. But we are now seeing much more random version of this – it’s First Past the Post snakes and ladders.
Take Newcastle Upon Tyne. Here the Lib Dems (22.3% vote share), Reform UK (22.9%) and the Green Party (25.7%) were all close to each other on vote share and received a similar number of seats. The Lib Dems got one seat more despite having the lower vote share of the three, but even more strikingly, Labour, not far behind on 17.1% dropped out the running entirely, retaining just two seats. The five-percentage point deficit to their nearest contender saw them sliding down the First Past the Post snake.
200 miles down the road in Newcastle Under Lyme a different game played out but with the same result for Labour. Reform UK benefitted from a significant First Past the Post winner’s bonus getting 61.4% of the seats from 38.7% of the vote and taking control of the council. The Conservatives lost control of the council but on 26.2% of the vote retained 15 seats (34.1%) whilst Labour on 20.8% vote share was reduced to just 2 seats (4.5%).
In London, the Greens landed on the First Past the Post snake in Hammersmith and Fulham (18.6% vote share, no seats) and Barking and Dagenham (21.8% vote share, four seats (7.8%)) but reached the ladder in Lewisham, taking 74.1% of seats on 42% of votes. Similar mixed fortunes for all parties played out across the local elections. No seats for the Conservatives in Sutton for their 17% vote share, just five seats (7.6%) for Reform in Sefton for their 25% of vote share.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day
Then there is the most random of all – the fluke First Past the Post proportional outcome. This was the case in Birmingham, the UK’s largest council with 101 seats up for grabs and where five parties and many independent candidates were in the running across the city creating highly fragmented contests. The Greens, Reform UK and Independent candidates all gained seats on the council whilst Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats managed to hold on in some areas. This time around the distribution of votes in particular areas led to a bizarrely proportional outcome, almost as proportional a result as it is possible to get!
What does it mean for Westminster?
Back in 2017 we called our General Election report Volatile Voting, Random Results highlighting how the increased party system fragmentation we saw emerging in 2010 and 2015 was leading to odd outcomes under First Past the Post. In 2024 this fragmentation led to the most disproportional election in British history. In a piece in the Economist last year, the system was described as ‘slot machine’ politics where “voting is becoming a high-stakes, wildly unpredictable gamble”.
Whereas before we have seen significant fragmentation in votes, followed by business as usual in Westminster seats, we are now seeing a wider variety of impacts at the local council level, often resulting in random outcomes. For parties, small differences in vote share, and in those of their opponents, can result in vastly different outcomes. For voters, there is little chance that their wishes will rationally translate into representation in elected chambers.
The question that hangs over these election results is, of course, what does this mean for the next General Election? The answer to that is simply, we can’t know. Under First Past the Post, the future of our country is on the roll of a dice – welcome to the democracy casino.
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