Local elections: What’s at stake – for voters and parties? 

The 2 May local elections will have more than 2,600 seats are at stake across 107 English councils. Labour’s Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham are among the 10 city mayors up for re-election.  

Those in Blackpool South will also be voting for their next MP after ex-Tory Scott Benton broke Commons lobbying rules, triggering a by-election.  

With the Conservatives lagging behind Labour in the polls, the outcome will offer some insight on how voters in England and Wales feel ahead of the general election. 

On the Sky News Daily, Niall Paterson is joined by Sky’s deputy political editor Sam Coates to discuss why the elections are so important for the prime minister’s future and where the key political backgrounds are.   

Producers: Emma Rae Woodhouse and Soila Apparicio 
Podcast promotions producer: Iona Brunker 
Editor: Paul Stanworth

trust in politics is broken so can we get UK politics working again that was the last time we were happy 2012 I’m Beth rby Sky political editor join me every week with Labour Jess Phillips and conservative peer Ruth Davidson for some electoral dysfunction this idea of nuance is completely left politics together we’ll focus on the policies that could deliver political satisfaction follow electoral dysfunction wherever you get your podcasts if you’re a fan of Elections stand by your beds because you’re in for a treat on Thursday the 2nd of May more than 2,600 seats across 107 English councils will be up for grabs voters in the capital will be electing the members of the London assembly and also the mayor throw in another 10 Meo elections and 37 police and crime Commissioners and it’s a swingometer dream and I didn’t even mention an end of term byelection but as always always people will be sifting the results to see what if anything we learn about the state of national politics which if yishi sunak might prove somewhat uncomfortable I’m Neil Patterson Welcome To The Sky News Daily back on the daily podcast and presumably as excited as a kid at Christmas our Deputy political editor Sam coats I mean f first and foremost you do live for kind of political moments like this don’t you look and this will be a hell of a political moment I think it’s it’s the thing that many MPS have been anticipating many of those in in Westminster politics have been anticipating uh even though it takes place uh in some cases hundreds of miles away from Westminster will be where the action is because it’s a moment where people take the political temperature uh what we’ve got on May the 2nd are council elections mayal elections police and crime commissioner elections and a byelection in Black South all in one day and and and because there’s a patchwork all across uh England and Wales we should say not Scotland and Northern Ireland uh Everybody by the way Neil in England and Wales gets a vote one way or another um I think it will inevitably be used as a moment to stand back and and and read the Tilles of what’s going on um and of course just walk us through what we are looking at because I I suppose the Baseline for comparison when it comes to what happens in terms of not just local elections as you said but those will be the the large chunk of them is what happened back in 2021 that’s right so you need to understand the sort of Patchwork of council seats that are up for grabs the conservative party and the labor party both are defending just shy of a thousand seats so the Tories have put up 985 existing councilors labor 965 liberal Democrats 410 green 107 with 169 Independents what matters is what changes and when those seats were last up the Tory party did particularly well given the point in the cycle because it was the high point of Boris Mania frankly the Tories were well ahead in the polls labor in the doldrums on the day that the results started flooding in K starma thought about resigning according to the biography about him uh because he was doing so badly he’ lost heartly poool a labor seat to the Tories and I think it was the sort of epiphany of Boris Johnson’s Premiership in some ways you remember the Boris Johnson floating over Harley pool and and today the position is completely reversed you know the the Tory party more or less according to the sky Po Po’s about 20 uh points behind the labor party so you would expect problems for the Tories and uh gains for labor now we have a way at Sky newes of benchmarking and I think if the Tories are on course for the kind of really quite bad night that we saw last year and last year was pretty catastrophic for them certainly was then you would expect the Tories to lose about 500 counselors in other words they’ve got about a th000 now and if they lose half of them that’s what Sky News analyst Michael Thrasher says it’ll be a bad night um comparable to last year if you compare last year for Labor uh then labor will be on course to get 350 gains now if they do that it’s a good night for labor Michael Thrasher says that doesn’t take them into the kind of Blair Landslide territory but it would be a solid night uh for the party uh the liberal Democrats well they could get maybe 100 50 would be a decent night for them and they’ve been doing really well in by elections of course when it comes to local authorities they have uh and I don’t have a figure for the greens but they could do very well uh as well uh reform UK is a funny one but they’re only putting up candidates in about one in eight possible seats so you can’t compare them on a light for light basis to the way we have been for the others so where should we be focusing our attention on the night Bing in mind of course that this is not like a a general election where we do get start to get results in about half an hour an hour of of of polls closing for for some of these local councils local authorities we’re going to be waiting some quite some time the results are spread over Thursday night at Friday daytime and and Saturday daytime at Sky we’re going to be zooming in on Reddit in Worcestershire um now that’s one of the few places that labor could take uh control all the way from the conservatives we’re looking at Walo in the West Midlands that’s a good example of where we might learn some lessons about reform UK that is a place where you can you can take the temperature for them um Gloucester uh so that’s obviously in the west of England that that’s somewhere where we could see the liberal Democrats take control from the Tories by the way I think the liberal Democrats have about 10 different councils uh at the moment in their control we would expect them to keep all of those by and large those are the kind of places where you can get a little bit of a shape of of the race by going into a bit of additional detail but where it really matters Neil is where these councils overlap with seats that the main parties want to win and labor will be pouring particular resource to for instance Reddit and wiers because there are so many parliamentary uh constituencies around around that area labor tell me that they are pouring in resource into the East Midlands the West Midlands and the teas Valley those are the three areas that worth kind of fighting the counil elections hard on because there’s also the potential gain uh then uh for parliamentary seats that you might pick up in the in the general election you mentioned on pass on their um meal elections I mean I would have thought that there might be a couple of them that the conservatives will be at particularly closely Andy Street in the West Midlands obviously but te Valley Ben hin there I mean he he stormed to Victory uh back in 2021 if the toris lose that one I mean I suspect there’ll be people at you know conservative Campaign Headquarters saying game over guys that’s right there were 10 meil elections a couple of them are new seats that we haven’t had before like the East Midlands uh but the vast majority of marol met these Metro Mayors um which also includes London by the way so big figures like Andy Burnham and sadique Khan but the two that we’re focusing on of course are the ones where there are t Mays in what some people might call effectively longtime labor area so that’s Andy Street in the West Midlands and teas Valley uh where you’ve got uh benon up in the Northeast now the West Midlands with Andy Street that’s on a knife edge actually there are some Tories that I talk to who think that they might be able to hang on he’s running a campaign that’s quite independent of the national brand uh they think they’re in with a shout there let let’s see um I think even more interesting is the teas Valley and actually I’ve been spending some time there where Ben hon has been elected twice can he get a third uh bite at the maril t uh he is also now a conservative Pier um and and what strikes you Neil is that he as well is sort of running a campaign based very much on sort of his personality and his own uh his own brand he he reminds me a lot of Boris Johnson who of course he was very close to he’s got big infrastructure projects he’s got a big personal following when I was up there you know last week we able to find people on the on the streets who were sort of self-identified as socialists and you know union members on on the one hand who were aware that there was some criticism of the way that he was running the big infrastructure project that teas Works who nevertheless would say they would never vote Tori otherwise but might yet put their EX in Ben Hon’s box because he’s a big figure qu to quote so many of the people I talk to he gets things done now there are some who criticizing going in quite hard against Ben hon including former supporters of his and Sam just just explain though I mean police and crime Commissioners as you correctly note right that is the reason that everyone in England and Wales will will have a vote uh on Election Day on polling day um but does anyone care police and crime Commissioners matter a huge amount because they have a big say over whether Chief constables can stay in their jobs or not but just because they have signific ific powers does not mean that there is a great deal of public Consciousness about them h i wonder whether they’ll still be here in 10 years time as it stands labor is fighting police and crime commissioner seat but but I find few people privately in Westminster who think that this system has been a a wild Triumph just to say police and crime commissioner elections are happening everywhere but London and Manchester where the Mayors there take the powers that otherwise police and crime commissioner might take that it that might be a kind of road map of what what happens to this role in future I have to say as more uh more places seem to be getting Mays and I’m sure that’s a trend that will continue but there isn’t a great love for them doesn’t seem to be a great love for them inside the labor party and even in parts of the Tory party it was a treesa May reform I’m not sure it stands the test of time but let let’s go back to to the main event more than 2,600 seats across 107 councils on what grounds will those individual battles be fought Sam it’s I’m I’m obviously asking you to answer an incredibly broad question in 30 seconds but you know we’ve mentioned reform a number of times on this podcast Richard Tyson of course Lee Anderson H now with the party you know they they don’t have a pedigree in local government they don’t have a pedigree in national government they can fight this election on whatever the hell they want to frankly but for the rest of the parties who have got records in local government you know it it does strike me that whilst we always view this through the national the prism of national politics there’s an awful lot that happens at local level take one example as regards council tax the raising off for example I think you’ve got Council funding more generally are are councils perceived to be wasteful did they invest in schemes that went wrong that ended up costing the taxpayer uh I think low traffic neighborhoods inevitably will be part of the conversation in parts of the country uh I think the quality of local Services matters and then that the amount that people paying council tax uh those the sorts of issues that that that that that will be fought on the meriles the Metro mariles well some of that discussion is going to be about investment and jobs because some of the main powers that Metro mares have uh are around um attracting inward investment to a particular area and sorting out the transport so I think that in London uh in teas Valley uh in Manchester you know Tay Andy Burnham he’ll be talking about the nationalization the bus system I suspect uh uh quite a lot so um the the the type of discussion will in part be related to the powers and responsibilities of who’s being elected that’s inevitable but inevitably there is a sort of tarnish and a dotted line link not a direct link but a dotted line link between the health of a political party nationally and and and how people vote locally that that that is inescapable Sam thanks for the moment but do stay where you are after the break we will be examining what if anything we might be able to learn from the results next week welcome back Sam kotz our Deputy political editor still with us talking about all things election next Thursday Sam explain to me why we care about these local elections given we can never really tell how much of what happens is to do with events at a local level and how much is down to say the actions of sunx starmer and so on because MPS do and because actually I think the biggest consequence of this race is almost a binary choice for the for the conservative party about whether they collectively decide that the performance of the conservative party under Rich unite was so bad in this set of local and Maryland PCC elections and in the byelection in Black PLL South that that they feel they need to take a stand and make a move against him or whether they don’t how MPS decide the election has gone it’s not going to be a matter of science they’re not going to have Michael Thrasher or John Curtis advising them it is going to be a matter of Art and emotion this is the expectation management and this is partly about expectation management how well things go compared to what they were expecting and it is partly about just the Raw results it’s partly about the conservative party watching maybe half of the foot soldiers who are up for election being wiped out no longer probably willing to help them in a general election all of these things come into play and that will be influencing Tory MPS when they basically make their stick or twist decision later on in May so genuinely and and I asked this because you are far more plumbed into the Matrix in Westminster than I ever am or or or ever was me genuinely there is still lingering discussion about whether or not to get rid of rishy sunak install a new conservative leader and therefore a new prime minister this side of a general election I mean it es and flows Neil but in the last eight days we’ve seen Action Man rishy and it feels kind of absolutely bizarre to be having the conversation should you replace rishy when he’s raising the defense budget and doing welfare reform but he’s got a big plan on Rwanda that’s just I can’t get the image of Action Man rishy sunak Out of My Head now out by it but remember just nearly two weeks ago we had the smoking vote which was a free vote but you know you saw cabinet ministers prepared to not follow rishy sunet through the voting lobbies on his Flagship reform to stop people of a certain age and below from ever smoking in their lives and you’ve got the Persistence of opinion polls that suggest an absolute Wipeout uh on general election day so yes it is still a conversation amongst the Parliamentary party and they are deferring a judgment to the other side of these uh local elections in many cases there is a discussion inside Downing Street about how to play that what to do about it it only takes 51 52 letters of no confidence to go into GR and Brady out of the 300 plus Tory MPS and you have to have one of these votes of no confidence in a sitting prime minister that hurdle is not desperately high no I would expect Richi sunet to win it and Win It comfortably but the recent political history of our country is that Prime Ministers win those votes but stagger on horribly so the question then being asked is if he wins at at that point does Richi sunak choose to go to the country in order to say look I’ve won this vote of no confidence uh I’ve got this set of plans I’m going to go now in the knowledge that if he just hangs on things are only likely to sort of get more more tricky even though he won that vote so at that point if there’s a vote of no confidence and he wins don’t rule out a general election but there there are paths with the flowchart that take us to all the different kind of possible outcomes which is why it’s going to be quite an exciting period I think after May the 2nd but but again going back to to something we were talking about earlier we probably can’t learn as much about reform a party that I know is causing ructions and consternation in kind of conservative central office and and at the Grassroots level we we won’t be able to look at what happens on May the 2nd and get a better idea or or a much better idea of what potential effect reform could have on the conservative vter at a general election that’s true I mean from UK are one of those parties that sort of really work and exist at a national level and and when it comes to a general election the primary function will probably to be to to take chunks of Voters away from the conservative box in certain constituencies such that they tip over into labor or the liberal Democrat that that’s probably their their role and all of that will happen through National messaging nobody I think would pretend in reform that they’ve got an expert local Council strategy even at this election uh in a week’s time uh there are a handful of candidates uh there are straws in the wind but this isn’t the terrain where they’re going into hand hand to hand combat with the Tores okay Sam and and look no doubt there will be plenty of attempts to to manage them over over the next few days but currently the expectation is bad night for the conservatives so money mouth Nexus time Mr courts what do you think is going to happen if Ben hon loses I think there’s pretty much down well Downing Street I think expect there to be a vote of no confidence if he wins a vote of no confidence don’t rule out having a general election but already I’ve given you so many ifs that that you can’t really hold me to it but there is one possible path that you could judge me on uh one possible path we’ll invite you back on if it happens Sam many thanks so plenty to look forward to and of course the daily team will be up through the we hours watching the results as they come in we’ll have a special edition of The Daily next Friday explaining all you need to know about what’s happened and what it means we’ll see you then but that’s your lot for today