If you live in England, you might be casting a vote for a councillor in a local election this May – and with your vote, expressing your desire for how you’d like your local services to be run. With councils responsible for the management of key services, from social care to parks and schools, local government is a way for us to have a say on the decisions that impact our local area.
From withdrawing your vote from the party in charge because you don’t think they have done a good enough job, to lending it to the challengers because you like their ideas, voting is the key to influencing the priorities of your local council.
So, it’s concerning that in England and Wales, we use a voting system that means that, for many voters, it makes no difference who they vote for.
The First Past the Post system used in England and Wales results in council chambers which are scarcely recognisable when it comes to how the local population voted. It means the ideal of local elections as a way for us to make our voices heard locally breaks down.
Local councils would be better off switching to the fairer system used in Scotland for their local elections, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) – giving us a system which puts power back into local hands.
We’d have local election results that match how we voted
In 2023, local elections saw some parties winning up to 90% of the available seats on less than half of the vote share. In Tameside, for example, Labour took 90% of the council seats despite only 48% of voters backing their candidates.
Why is this? The problem with First Past the Post is that the winner only needs to win by a single vote in a crowded field. The ‘winner’ might only win a third of the vote, but as long as nobody got more, they will become the councillor. The problem comes about when the same party wins every ward on a similar level of support. Winning a third of the vote in every ward, could become winning every seat in the council chamber. Many councils aren’t that far off our hypothetical example.
That means that often, the makeup of the council simply won’t match the makeup of the votes cast – as all the votes cast for anyone other than the winner won’t contribute to the result.
Every vote is a message from a voter on how they want local services to be run.
It’s a bit of a stretch to say that we can all have a say in how our local services are run, when this system means huge swathes of these messages never translate into councillors who can put them into action.
By contrast, in Scotland council chambers are much closer to how everyone voted. And this means that we can actually hold sway over council decisions, as we’d be getting councils which actually represent us.
That’s what we should demand, and expect, in a representative democracy.
You should be able to influence how your local area is run
If you want to save your local library, get more green space, or see lower (or higher for that matter) council tax bills you need your vote to count.
Under First Past the Post, votes cast in local elections go to waste unless they’re votes for the winners. But also, the excess votes, those above the level they needed to win, make no difference.
That means that huge swathes of voters are left in a position where their vote has had no impact on the election results. Some councillors can afford to lose a lot of support in the knowledge that nothing will happen.
When a councillor can afford to lose your vote, how can you influence them?
By contrast, the Single Transferable Vote is a system which sees far fewer wasted votes, so councillors know that every vote matters, and every voter should be listened to.
STV is a tried and tested alternative
The fact is, the way we currently elect our local representatives just isn’t adequate. Huge swathes of us aren’t getting the councils we voted for, which means huge numbers of us get no say in the local decisions that really affect us.
STV is an excellent alternative to this broken system not just in theory, but in practice. In Scotland, councils have been elected via STV since 2007, and it’s put an end to councils dominated by a single party when the local area is much more mixed. As Professor Sir John Curtice illustrated in his 2022 report on the impact of STV in Scottish Local Elections, the Scottish system is a powerful example of how local democracy can put power into peoples’ hands.
Ultimately, in Scotland, voters have more say over how their local council is run than we do in England and Wales – and it’s because they scrapped the unfair system of First Past the Post, in favour of STV.
Want your vote to matter in local elections? Add your name to our call.