Elections are a crucial part of the democratic process. Citizens have the right to expect a regular opportunity to express a view about who should exercise power in their name, at all levels of government.
That is why it is concerning that the UK government has overseen late-stage postponements of some English local council elections, in both 2025 and 2026.
In four areas (East Sussex, Norfolk, Suffolk and West Sussex) county council elections have been postponed in both years. This means voters across these areas will not have had an opportunity to renew the mandates of their upper tier (county) councillors for at least six years. A standard term length for English councillors is four years. This means in some authorities, councillors will serve a term and a half, possibly longer, without facing voters, which is unacceptable.
Why have local elections been cancelled across England?
The government’s reasoning for these postponements relates to their English local government reorganisation programme. This involves all areas that operate a two-tier model (county councils and district councils) moving to a system where one council (a unitary authority) is responsible for all council-run services.
The government has defended election postponements on the basis that these councils will soon be abolished and that holding elections for councillors who are unlikely to serve a full term would be a waste of money; that those councils going through the reorganisation process may lack the capacity to hold elections at the same time; and that there is precedent for such postponements, with previous Conservative governments having done the same thing. For example, a number of district council elections across Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire, scheduled for May 2019, were postponed ahead of the creation of new unitary authorities in those areas. While county council elections in three areas (Cumbria; North Yorkshire; Somerset), scheduled for May 2021, were postponed ahead of the creation of new unitary authorities in those areas.
The government’s reasons for cancelling these elections are not good enough
Any decision to postpone an election should meet the highest threshold and the strong presumption should be that elections go ahead as planned. We share the concerns of the Electoral Commission, that postponing elections should only happen in exceptional circumstances and that the reasons given for these delays do not meet that criteria. As the Electoral Commission’s Chief Executive noted:
“As a matter of principle, we do not think that capacity constraints are a legitimate reason for delaying long planned elections. Extending existing mandates risks affecting the legitimacy of local decision-making and damaging public confidence.”
Elections are the key pillar of our representative democracy and should not be dismissed as a bureaucratic inconvenience. It is concerning that elections could be seen as something that detracts from councils’ roles, rather than the vital mandate local politicians need to make decisions for the residents they serve.
It is also concerning that the decision to seek postponement or not has been left to individual councils, creating a clear conflict of interest. The result is that elections will be cancelled in almost half (29) of the 63 councils consulted, with one request for postponement still being considered. In some cases, neighbouring councils, in what look like very similar situations, have taken different approaches, one requesting postponement of elections and the other saying their elections should go ahead.
Should the minister be able to cancel local elections with the stroke of a pen?
As we have seen from the four county council examples, there is no guarantee that elections to replacement unitary authorities will take place the year after any postponement. Even if elections to successor authorities do take place the following year, it is likely that councillors elected for the existing local authority would still serve almost half of their term, as there is often a handover period of around 11 months, when both the new authority and old authority are in existence.
It is time for the rules around the postponement of local elections in England to be examined and the situations in which they can be postponed defined much more clearly. It is also time to question whether such postponements should be allowed to happen solely at the stroke of the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government’s pen.