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Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered e-petition 747234 relating to the Secretary of State’s power to cancel local elections.
It is a great pleasure to serve under your Caledonian chairmanship, Mr Mundell. We are old friends from the past.
As Chair of the Petitions Committee, I believe I speak for all its members when I say that it is always encouraging to see such strong public engagement in our democratic system. The petition has attracted well over 150,000 signatures, right across the United Kingdom. That level of support speaks positively about how our citizens care deeply about the timing, integrity and accountability of local elections. I thank the petition’s creator Dr Chris Barnes, whom I had the pleasure of meeting prior to the debate, and all those who have taken the time to add their name to it.
The petition calls on the Government to remove the Secretary of State’s statutory power to postpone or cancel scheduled local elections. That power is conferred on the Government by section 87 of the Local Government Act 2000. Dr Barnes’s petition states that
“the right to vote is sacred and inalienable”,
and he argues that elections due to take place in May 2026 and beyond should proceed as planned. Many signatories have expressed concern that postponement risks undermining democratic accountability and public trust. Last month, the Government did a U-turn on the decision. Regardless, we are here to debate the principle at the heart of the initial decision to delay the elections.
In their official response, the Government make it clear that the relevant powers are set out in legislation passed by Parliament. They state that such powers are
“used only with strong justification”
and that any use is subject to parliamentary scrutiny through the statutory instrument process. The Government have also indicated that they have no current plans to amend the legislation in question. They add that similar powers have previously been used in limited and specific circumstances, including in the context of local government reorganisation. The debate therefore concerns not only the principle of regular elections, but the appropriate balance between statutory flexibility and democratic certainty.
Local elections are the cornerstone of representative democracy. Councillors make decisions on housing, social care, planning, transport and a range of other services that have a direct impact on daily life. I should know, having spent a good number of years as a councillor myself.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
The Chairman of the Petitions Committee is introducing the debate very well. I was a local councillor too, in Basildon in the early 1990s. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is a good thing that the Government have done a reverse ferret, so we can now have local elections across the country, including in Labour-led Basildon, Labour-led Southend and Labour-led Thurrock? Those councils will now have to face the electorate on their appalling record.
Jamie Stone
I thank the right hon. Member for his customarily incisive intervention.
Local elections surely ensure that decisions are subject to scrutiny and renewal. The expectation that electors will have an opportunity to choose their representatives at predictable intervals is surely fundamental to public confidence. Independent bodies have emphasised that very point. The Electoral Commission has stated that scheduled elections should, as a rule, proceed as planned and should be postponed only in exceptional circumstances. It has cautioned that uncertainty around election timing can undermine public confidence and create difficulties for voters, campaigners and administrators alike.
Similarly, the Electoral Reform Society has expressed concern to me about the democratic implications of postponements that significantly extend councillors’ terms. In particular, it has warned that where delays coincide with electoral cycles, some councillors could serve for up to seven years without facing the electorate. O that I had ever had that opportunity in my own career as a councillor! Such extensions risk weakening accountability and should prompt careful review of the safeguards surrounding the Government’s postponement powers.
Those concerns are shared, to varying degrees, across the political spectrum. My own party has argued that local elections should not be treated as administrative conveniences. We have emphasised the importance of protecting fixed and predictable electoral timetables. We have raised questions about the concentration of discretion in the hands of a single Minister. We have called for stronger safeguards and greater transparency where postponement is proposed. Similarly, Conservative Members have underlined the importance of upholding democratic mandates. However, some have reasoned that, once conferred by Parliament, statutory powers must be capable of being exercised where the law so permits.
In response, the present Government have stressed that the powers in question are not new; they were established by Parliament to deal with defined circumstances such as the structural reorganisation of local government. The Government argue that a mechanism must remain to ensure orderly transitions where boundaries change or authorities are merged, and that such decisions are subject to legislative oversight and are not to be exercised arbitrarily. I am sure that we will examine those points more closely in the debate.
Those differing perspectives are united by the shared recognition that elections are not merely procedural events, but the very means by which authority is conferred and renewed. Any decision to postpone them must therefore meet a very high threshold of justification and transparency. It surely must never be motivated by self-interest. That would instil distrust in our democracy, which is very precious to us all.
The petition and the debate that it has prompted reflect broader public anxiety about democratic accountability. In recent years, as we all know, trust in political institutions has been tested. It is therefore understandable that proposals or decisions that affect when voters may next go to the polls attract scrutiny and very strong opinions. At the same time, Parliament has long recognised that exceptional circumstances may require flexibility. The legal framework governing elections is complex, and changes to local authority structures, emergencies or other significant disruptions may necessitate adjustments. The question for this House, however, is not whether elections matter—I trust that all Members of the House believe that—but how best to reconcile the principle of regular democratic renewal with the practical realities of governance.
The petition process exists precisely to enable such questions to be posed and examined. That is why we are here tonight. When substantial numbers of people across the country express concern in a democratic system, as they have done with this petition, Parliament must surely listen. It is right that Ministers have the opportunity to set out clearly the legal basis for the powers concerned, the circumstances in which they may be used and the safeguards that exist. It is equally right that Members on all sides test those explanations where appropriate.
I hope that today’s debate will contribute to clarity, transparency and accountability. I reassure all those who signed the petition that their concerns are being taken seriously in this debate, because that is precisely what the Petitions Committee is all about. I will listen with the greatest interest to what my colleagues have to say and to how the Minister who is kindly representing the Government responds.
Mr Will Forster (Woking) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your leadership, Mr Mundell. Thank you for chairing this debate. I also thank the almost 153,000 people across the country who signed the petition, including 186 in my constituency of Woking who I think signed it because they—we—unreasonably lost our right to vote in Surrey county council’s elections last year, which were unreasonably taken away by this Government.
Did people lose their right to vote because of massive, significant events that meant that we just could not go and vote? Was it a world war? Elections in the first world war and the second war had to be postponed. Was it a foot and mouth crisis like 2001?
Mr Francois
Just as a matter of record, we had a general election in Britain in July 1945, when we were still involved in fighting the second world war in the far east. If we can have a general election in wartime, I see no reason why we could not have local elections this May in peacetime.
Mr Forster
I quite agree. My memory does not stretch back as far as that, but the right hon. Gentleman is completely right. Elections have been postponed only during serious wartime, during the foot and mouth crisis of 2001 and, as we all—even I—remember, during the covid pandemic in 2020. But in Surrey and across a lot of the country, people lost their right to vote because of local government reorganisation, which is not exactly an existential threat to our way of life.
People in Surrey are now stuck with county councillors who were last elected in 2021. The only reason why there are Conservatives representing my constituency is that since 2021 it has not been possible to vote them out of office. Every year since then, the Conservatives have put up candidates for Woking borough council. They have lost every single election.
We are now creating a new council for my area, West Surrey council. It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to give my area a fresh start. We have not had such an opportunity for 50 years, but in the meetings setting it in motion, there are people who have lost their mandate because it has expired. That is completely unreasonable, and it is because of the use of the Secretary of State’s powers that the petition opposes. After the past month, the Secretary of State probably wishes he had never had them in the first place.
These are my questions to the Minister. Given that the Government have now reversed their decision to postpone the 2026 local elections following legal advice, can she confirm whether the same legal considerations applied to the nine local council elections that were postponed in 2025, including those for Surrey county council? Can she confirm to me and my Woking constituents, by outlining what legal advice the Government have had, that those elections were lawfully postponed? Finally, what material change in circumstances occurred between the decision to postpone the 2026 local elections and the subsequent decision to reverse that postponement?
Because the Government have not been open and transparent about the legal advice that they received, my constituents of Woking and the 153,000 people who signed the petition have lost what little trust they had in government and politics. The Government can start to regain that trust by publishing their legal advice and ensuring that in future no one Minister can cancel local elections.
John Milne (Horsham) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank people in my constituency and across the country for signing this petition in such numbers and with such great speed; that is very revealing of the distress that has been caused.
The first question is how we got into this mess. This Government’s handling of the local government reorganisation process has been nothing short of shambolic. Councils across the country, including in my area of Sussex, have been forced to make complex and controversial decisions at breakneck speed. Local government reorganisation was not in the Labour manifesto. It is such a huge change, but it was not even mentioned. In Sussex, as in many places, it was obvious that councils operating under a rainbow of different political persuasions would struggle to find consensus over new boundaries and structures, but the Government insisted on going ahead anyway.
The decision to allow councils to postpone their elections was even worse. It has become very apparent that the councils that asked for delays did not do so for practical, logistical reasons, but simply because they were afraid they would be dumped out of office. That is exactly the situation at my council, West Sussex county council, where the Conservative ruling group has known for some time that it would face oblivion at the next election. When offered the chance to save itself last year with what was described as an election postponement, it reached out and grabbed it. It probably could not believe its luck when it was given the opportunity to cancel elections again this year—at least until the Government’s handbrake U-turn in the face of probable legal embarrassment.
Holding elections at such short notice places great strain on council officers, especially given the pressures of ongoing unitarisation—I really feel for them, given the pressure they are under. However, it is the right outcome, even if we have reached it in the worst possible way. Repeatedly denying residents the right to vote was wrong, wrong, wrong. By the time it had finished, the Conservative group in West Sussex would have retained control for seven years—far beyond the four years it was originally voted in for and for which it had a mandate.
The Government’s U-turn, which means that elections are back on, is tough on councillors who were recently voted in in by-elections, which were called only because of the delay, and that includes two Lib Dems in my own constituency of Horsham. If the Government had let elections go ahead when they should have done last year, we would never have wasted money on by-elections that never needed to happen.
Across the country, of the 30 councils that asked for a delay this year, 26 were Labour, three Conservative and one Lib Dem, which was in Cheltenham. In defence of Cheltenham, the position is unique because of recent ward boundary changes. All 40 councillors were only recently elected, in 2024, in what was a specially timetabled election. They are currently just two years into their normal four-year term, but will now be forced to hold another election halfway through.
I am not surprised that the elections issue has caused such anger across the country—leading to this petition—because it is about something that is as fundamental as you can get: the right to vote. I fully support the petitioners in my own constituency, and I am glad they are going to get their chance to vote after all, even if it means I am going to have to spend a lot of my weekends until May knocking on doors, like everyone else here.
I do not doubt that the Conservatives will be swept from power in West Sussex. In the last few years, the political map of Sussex has changed beyond recognition. In 2023, Horsham district council became Lib Dem for the first time this century, and in 2024 I had the honour of becoming the first non-Conservative MP for Horsham in 144 years. So I look forward to 7 May, when we can finally bring West Sussex county council kicking and screaming up to date.
To conclude, this was a mess we did not need to get into, so I support the proposal in the petition to remove the Secretary of State’s right to cancel elections. We have only to look at recent events to be certain that such a right is wide open to political exploitation, as has just happened. I hope the Minister will consider amending the legislation, as proposed.
Nigel Farage (Clacton) (Reform)
No taxation without representation is quite a powerful political adage, and it has worked well over the years. What people were facing in many parts of the country was paying their council tax, but not being able to have a say and, in certain cases, elected county councillors staying in position for a full seven years.
However, it was not just the Minister that did this. It was done with the connivance of the Conservative party, which did everything it could to deny the vote in Norfolk, Suffolk, East and West Sussex, and initially in Surrey—doing its best to stop people voting for two consecutive years. And the Lib Dems got in on the act in Cheltenham, although, granted, in slightly different circumstances.
Talking of the Lib Dems, I have been having a very good chat with a prominent Liberal Democrat who I get on rather well with, Sir Bob Russell, who represented Colchester for many years. He made the point that there was last fundamental local government reorganisation in England 50 years ago, but no one suggested that elections should be cancelled, delayed or postponed. In fact, the debate about the shape of local government reorganisation became part of the campaigns and an issue upon which people voted.
I am proud of the fact that 153,000 people signed the petition, but I am even prouder that 4.6 million people will get the vote on 7 May because of the judicial review that I took against the Government. I am proud of that, and Reform will go on fighting for proper, open democracy.
It is clear that section 87 of the Local Government Act 2000 delegates way too much power to a Minister of any Government, and that elections are completely fundamental to liberty and freedom in our country. We need to change section 87—I ask the Government to support this—to make sure that, in the future, any delays to elections, for whatever reason, must be the subject of primary legislation, open debate and a vote by all Members of Parliament. If we do that, we will never finish up in this awful mess and with this lack of trust in politics again.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I commend the Chair of the Petitions Committee, the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), for the skilful way in which he introduced this important topic.
The Government’s original reason for postponing the elections was that councils were too busy with local government reform. In Essex, we had the bizarre situation where some of those involved in LGR thought they were not too busy to have elections, and some—mainly Labour-led councils—thought they were.
I served on Basildon council in the early 1990s, when we went around this buoy before, under John Major’s premiership. The idea then was not to have mayors, but to have one unitary system across the county. I was involved in the negotiations between Basildon and other authorities. In the end, to cut a long story short, the whole thing broke down because no one could agree on who to team up with. There were too many old rivalries and too many differences between towns, and the whole thing collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. When I heard we were going around that buoy again, I confess, perhaps based on my previous experience, that I was deeply sceptical. I remember saying to my local Rayleigh and Wickford Conservative association at one of our quarterly executive meetings more than three years ago, “Don’t take it as axiomatic that this will all happen. It fell apart last time; it could yet fall apart again.”
Where are we now? We were supposed to have mayoral elections this May; the Government have postponed them to May 2028. We are supposed to have a mayoral combined authority, so now we face the bizarre position where we would have an unelected combined authority—it is an unelected committee of a handful of senior councillors drawn from several constituent councils—but with no mayor. The fate of the combined authority now appears to be effectively in abeyance.
Labour’s whole argument for doing all of this is to move from a two-tier system to a single-tier system. That is not true. The two-tier system we have at the moment is Essex county council as the upper tier, with a series of district, borough and city councils below. The third tier of parish and town councils are basically unaffected either way. We are now moving to another two-tier system, where we will have a mayoral and a combined authority as the upper tier and a bunch of unitary authorities—whether three or four or five—as the lower tier. We will have gone through all this cost, misery and uncertainty to go from one two-tier system to another. The whole argument is nonsense from the get-go.
Moreover, I have been door-knocking in my constituency for 25 years, and I have never—not once, ever—had an elector say to me on the doorstep, “I want a mayor of Essex.” Members can take it from me: if Essex people want something, they are not shy to let their politicians know. [Interruption.] I see that the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) is grinning; he has obviously experienced that himself. They do not want a mayor of Essex. If they do, they have not said so. It has no demos. There is no public demand for it. People are not clamouring for a mayor. We have never had one in 1,000 years, but suddenly the Government think we need some Sadiq Khan for Essex. That is about as popular as a bowl of—well, it is not very popular.
Where do we now sit? Southend unitary authority—forgive me, it is Southend city council, for which my great friend Sir David Amess campaigned for many years; if he were here, he would chide me now. Southend city council conducted its own consultation about a year ago, and two thirds of the people who replied did not want any change at all. The Government instituted a wider consultation county-wide—for the avoidance of doubt, that is Greater Essex, including Southend and Thurrock—which closed on 15 January. When the Minister replies, perhaps she could tell us, some six weeks on, what the result of that consultation was. If she does not have that information to hand, perhaps she could tell us when she intends to publish the results of the consultation. I am sure that that will be before the local elections—before we get to purdah in the third week of March—so that the good people of Essex know what their fellow county people have said before we go to the polls. I am going to take a punt: it is going to reveal that there was little enthusiasm for any local government reorganisation whatever in Essex. If the Minister wants to prove me wrong, she can publish the results of the consultation.
Labour sought to postpone these elections and now, thanks to campaigning by—I admit—Reform, and by the Conservatives and others, but overwhelmingly due to public pressure, which perhaps both parties have managed to articulate in our different ways, the Government have given in. Now those elections are back on, and people in Southend, Basildon and Thurrock can go to the polls and peacefully and democratically express their opinion on the Labour mob who run those three councils should be allowed to carry on.
Mr Francois
I give way to the right hon. Gentleman from Northern Ireland, because no debate in Parliament would be complete without him.
Jim Shannon
Honourable would be enough for me. Does the right hon. Member agree that the elections are not just bureaucratic processes? They are how communities hold leaders to account, set local priorities and influence decisions that affect their everyday lives. If anybody tries to stop an election, it will backfire on them. Does the right hon. Member agree that people’s opinions are the priority? Let people decide. Do not deny them their right to the ballot box.
Mr Francois
I have two responses to the hon. Gentleman, whom I have a great deal of time for, as he knows. First, the Chairman of the Petitions Committee laid out clearly the responsibilities of local government, so I shall not try your patience, Mr Mundell, or that of the rest of the Chamber by repeating them, but it is everything from planning to housing, adult social care and education. These things affect people’s everyday lives, and they are really important. People should have a democratic right to decide which councillors run those services, which they pay for as customers via their council tax. So of course there should be elections.
Secondly, and on a personal note, and I hope that the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and other colleagues here will understand this: nobody delayed the general election. I went into battle 20 points behind in the polls. No one gave me a bye; I had to fight to be here. I had to convince my employers, in my constituency, to renew my contract of employment to represent them, and so did everyone else in this House this evening, so why should it be different for local councillors? Why do they not have to get their contract of employment, in effect, renewed by their employers at the ballot box?
I thank the Minister for the fact that the local elections will now go ahead. She may recall that we had some sparky exchanges in the Commons Chamber about this, but we have ended up with the right decision, albeit after far too long. So if the people of Essex wish to support the Government’s bonkers housing targets—mandatory and top-down, imposed by some Whitehall civil servant who could not find Essex with a TomTom, and supported by a mad computer algorithm—they can go and vote for that. If, conversely, they want to vote for Conservative councillors, who care about the area they live in and want to defend the green belt and carry on providing good services to people at a cost that they can afford, they have the chance to vote Conservative—although, for the record, other products are available.
People can actually have elections in Essex and pass a verdict, and I very much hope that in my corner of the world—for Essex county council, for Rochford district council and for Basildon borough council—they will vote Conservative. But however they vote, whomever they choose, whomever they give the very important mandate to run those really important services to, the fundamental point is that they will be allowed to exercise their right to choose. It was this Government who very nearly took that away and we should never let them forget it. Other than that, I have no firm view on the matter.
Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Reform)
Cancelling elections is always wrong, unless there is an extreme situation that necessitates postponement of an election. I cannot think of many examples in recent years in which that was necessary. I remember when Margaret Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council. She extended its term by one year only and then the GLC was, rightly, abolished. I remember that during the covid pandemic, the Greater London Authority’s term was extended by one year, but then it was shortened in the next term, so there was a five-year term and then a three-year term. Cancelling elections—I think, in this case, purely for political reasons—is fundamentally dishonest of this Government. It was only because of the actions of my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), who sought a judicial review, that the Government were forced to do another U-turn, allowing the right of the people of this country to vote for their chosen local councillors in the forthcoming elections on 7 May.
I would like to make a further point, because democracy is not only about how people vote in local elections and whom they choose as their local councillors; it is also about the structure of local government. My borough is the London borough of Havering, as the Minister knows only too well because I have spoken about it on many occasions. I was rather disappointed that the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) did not acknowledge that the London borough of Havering actually is also an Essex borough. The problem is that the people of my borough have never been given the chance to choose whether we want to be under the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority, or whether we would prefer to be a unitary authority or under the new Greater Essex. We simply do not get given the chance to decide. We are not asked. Our opinion does not matter. We are forced into an artificial Greater London structure that does not suit the interests of my borough. It means that we are paying vast sums of money to, effectively, subsidise inner London. It means that things like ULEZ are imposed on us. It means that planning is taken out of our control, so we are Londonised and are becoming a concrete jungle. All these things have no democratic mandate from the people of Havering.
Postponing elections is really just as bad as denying local people the right to choose what kind of structure they would like to be in. My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton was in Romford outside the town hall only last week, and the popularity in my borough of a local referendum on becoming a unitary authority outside Greater London is extremely high. I say to the Minister that if we believe in democracy, we need to be given the chance to make those decisions.
The key point here is that we are only debating this issue because of the petition—I commend the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) on introducing it to the House. Frankly, it is a disgrace that we have to do this and that so many people had to sign a petition purely to demand their right to vote in a democratic election on 7 May. My borough was voting anyway; our election was not postponed. We are looking forward to quite a big change in Havering—and I think there will be a big change—because people are tired of being governed by City Hall and tired of being governed by a town hall that is not representative of the local community. I firmly believe that we will have the first Reform UK council in the Greater London area.
I would like to make a point to the hon. Member for Woking (Mr Forster). I agree with everything he said. The Liberal Democrats have an honourable position in terms of democracy—I think there was a little issue in Cheltenham, but let’s not worry about that. The Liberal Democrats were very clear that there should have been elections. However, under the restructuring of local government, his new local authority will be called West Surrey. Surely it should be called West Surrey and South Middlesex to reflect the true historic county identity of that area. If we are going to rename local authorities, we should give them names that reflect the geography and history of the area. It is very important that Middlesex is included in the name of the new unitary authority. I hope he agrees.
Mr Forster
I thank the hon. Member for highlighting that matter, with which I have some sympathy, and which Liberal Democrat colleagues in Spelthorne have highlighted. We are going to have a new council called West Surrey, one sixth of which is in south Middlesex. The Government are considering the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion, and I hope they give it due consideration. One of the concerns is that only one sixth is in south Middlesex, so why should it be half the name? However, I am more concerned about the fact that the council will inherit over £4 billion of debt from the former Conservative administrations. That is more of a priority for me than the name, but I have some sympathy with the hon. Gentleman.
Andrew Rosindell
I am glad the hon. Gentleman has sympathy with me, because local identity matters. Giving a council a name that everyone feels represented by is very important, so I hope that will become a reality. Middlesex Heritage is campaigning strongly for this. Even I get requests to raise this issue, although I am not a Middlesex MP—I am an Essex MP, and proud of it.
I hope that the Government have learned a lesson here. Democracy has been fought for over many centuries and many generations. It is not something to just discard, postpone or delay purely for political advantage. I am afraid that the Government have been caught out on this issue. I believe the Minister should apologise today for the denial of democracy. Thank goodness the threat of a judicial review prompted the Government to make the U-turn so that the people of this country can properly vote in local elections on 7 May.
Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)
I congratulate you on securing quality, if not quantity, of speakers in this debate, Mr Mundell; it is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) for introducing the debate, and the 262 of my constituents who signed this petition. They are right: the Secretary of State’s power to cancel elections, certainly without recourse to Parliament, should be removed. The Liberal Democrats opposed cancelling the elections and are opposing top-down reorganisations of councils in various places. We opposed the cancelling of the elections at the time, including in Parliament. That is why we tabled a prayer motion in the House of Commons and a fatal motion in the House of Lords, which would have stopped the Government’s secondary legislation that cancelled the elections. Unfortunately, the Conservatives did not support the motion in the House of Lords, and therefore the cancellation went ahead.
The delaying of elections in certain local authorities meant that incumbent councillors were permitted to remain in post for longer than their elected period, which, as other hon. Members have said, directly contravened the democratic mandates given to them by voters. Simply moving the goalposts and silencing millions of voters is totally unacceptable and a subversion of the democratic process. The public deserve to know how such an obviously undemocratic plan was allowed to get so far. Even though the Government have said they will not provide it, the Liberal Democrats will repeat our call to see the full legal and other advice that the Government relied on, so that the public can see exactly how the plan came to fruition.
It is not just this Government. In May 2021, 5,000 councillor elections went ahead, but not the hundreds of elections that the Conservative Government cancelled in Cumbria, Carlisle, South Lakeland and Somerset because of unpopular, top-down reorganisations. What the Conservatives began this Government have continued, with an unwanted, top-down reorganisation of many council areas.
It was in not just Cumbria and Carlisle, but my own county of Somerset, where the Conservatives took it to extremes. The 2021 election delay to facilitate the unwanted Somerset-wide unitarisation was being discussed by Ministers with the then Conservative leader while the Conservatives’ previous merger of two Somerset district councils was barely a year old. The merged district council, which went on to become part of the new Somerset unitary council, has gone down as the shortest-lived local authority in history. Millions of pounds were wasted and the public will was ignored, just as it is far too often ignored now. In both Somerset mergers, calls for the previous Government to respect a referendum or poll of local people were ignored. Elections were delayed and the new super-large council emerged, covering 60 miles. About 20 towns and 400 villages were lashed together for Conservative convenience, even though the public voted clearly for two smaller unitary councils.
Now, just like then, local authorities have been grappling with the severe and additional pressures that the Government’s reorganisation is placing on their budgets. As a result, and because of Government flip-flopping and the lack of clear and prompt communication about whether local elections will go ahead, many are now scrambling to prepare for elections in just a few weeks’ time. They are staffed by electoral services officers, many of whose district council employers have been lined up for abolition. Does that not raise serious questions as to whether they will be able to deliver essential free and fair elections?
Given the Government have now reversed their decision to postpone the 2026 local elections, can the Minister confirm whether the same legal considerations applied to the nine local elections postponed in 2025? Does she believe that the postponement of the elections by the Conservative Government in 2021 was lawful or not? As the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) said, the characteristic here is cancelling elections for unpopular, top-down reorganisations. Somerset will be lashed together with Dorset, Wiltshire and some other authorities to become Wessex. When I have visited flooded villages on the Somerset levels, nobody has come up to me and said, “What I really want is a metro mayor.” Unless we can bring back King Alfred, I suspect they are not going to back the idea at all. Will the Minister make clear what amount of taxpayer money is being spent on legal costs arising from proceedings related to the proposed postponement of local elections?
These are real questions that the Government need to answer. The Liberal Democrats, who oppose the cancelling of elections, will keep asking those questions. We have consistently stood against cancellations by the Conservatives and by this Government. We are clear that the decision to cancel should never have been taken, and democracy delayed is democracy denied.
David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Mundell, at a time when Parliament is very active in the world of local government, which shows how much it matters. We heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) about his local government experience and the diversity of services that local authorities provide; over 800 different services are provided by each council on average. That reflects the level of interest that all Governments and parties have in ensuring that the organisation and structure are correct.
As the Opposition, we have approached the issue of local government reorganisation with the seriousness with which we treated the same issue when we were in government. Where we are this evening, in looking at this petition, and where we have been in recent weeks, is fairly and squarely a mess of this Government’s making.
We must reflect that, when in government, we undertook, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford described, a number of reorganisations of local authorities, in each case committing that elections would never be deferred for more than a 12-month period—and they never were. There are good grounds for saying to our constituents, “Why spend millions of taxpayers’ money electing councillors to an authority that is about to be abolished? Better instead to have elections for the successor authorities.”
At the outset of this process—the former Minister, the hon. Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon), is well recorded in Hansard—there was a very clear devolution priority programme in which councils were told, “You are going to be abolished. The Government will bring forward that legislation. Elections will go ahead for new unitary authorities or new mayors in your local area, so democracy will not be denied. You are engaging with this process in good faith. The voters will have their say. But what we are not going to do is elect people to councils that are about to be abolished.”
We are in this position today because the Government have signally failed to deliver on their devolution priority programme. Just one of those local authority areas, Surrey, has achieved the status of getting its new unitary authorities approved by Parliament—18 months into a process that the Government have described as a flagship programme.
Let us reflect on the process that Parliament followed. At the outset, the former Minister brought proposals to a Delegated Legislation Committee in March 2025 to postpone the elections in all the devolution priority programme areas. Members of the Conservative party on that Committee voted against those proposals, because we were not convinced by what the Minister was setting out about the deliverability of the underlying devolution priority programme. We have been proved correct.
In a situation where the Government were clear that the authorities were going to be abolished but had yet to bring forward any clear programme for the creation of the new mayors, and had yet to pass the legislation in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill that would set up the framework for that, we made the argument that cancelling elections was not a responsible thing to do. Nonetheless, the Government pressed ahead, despite those warnings from the Conservative Opposition. Following that, of course, there was a reshuffle in Government.
At this point, it will be of value to reflect on the Gould principles, which underlie decision-making and state that, when cancellations of this nature occur, a minimum of six months’ notice is normally provided. Clearly, putting elections off for 12 months in authorities that, at the end of that period, would simply be 12 months closer to abolition creates huge uncertainty for local voters.
When we look at the frequent urgent questions, the opportunities we have used in Hansard through departmental questions and Opposition day debates to raise this issue, it is clear that we have sought to hold the Government to account. I reflect, for example, that I was told in response to an urgent question in December that, to quote from Hansard,
“the Government’s intention is that all the elections scheduled for next May will go ahead next May.”—[Official Report, 24 November 2025; Vol. 776, c. 5.]
The following day, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government told the House that those mayoral elections scheduled for this May in those devolution areas were being cancelled after all. It is abundantly clear that there has been chaos in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government —a complete lack of direction—and it has left local government leaders across the country, who have been seeking to act in good faith and with an eye to the good use of taxpayers’ money and maintaining democracy in their areas, in an incredibly difficult position. The fact that we have seen Ministers, literally 24 hours later, reversing the position that they had been telling Parliament, has been characteristic of that entire process.
Let us reflect on the decisions that led to the most recent hokey cokey, the Government having made it clear that they were minded to press ahead with cancelling those elections. We know that the feedback from local government leaders around the country is that they were placed under enormous pressure by the Department and Ministers to say that they wanted the cancellation to go ahead, to the extent that drafts of letters were sent back to council leaders asking them to say in more clear and serious terms what the impact would be on devolution if the elections were to go ahead according to schedule; to their credit, many of those leaders and local authorities resisted the pressure that they were put under. But that resulted in the Secretary of State making the announcement that he would be bringing forward proposals to cancel elections in those 31 local authority areas, with Pendle being added 24 hours after the announcement was made—again, characteristic of the chaotic approach that the Government have adopted.
What is curious about the whole process—and this is the nub of the questions that I put to the Minister—is that although we have heard a lot from Reform Members about the judicial review, we need to be clear that Reform did not win a judicial review against the Government. The Government surrendered without a shot being fired; they essentially offered no defence. The Secretary of State, with the judicial review coming into view, decided to reverse his decision. Had he brought forward legislation to Parliament to cancel or postpone these elections, that would have been beyond the scope of a judicial review, as parliamentary proceedings are—as was the case when he dealt with exactly the same set of questions on the basis of legal advice that the Department had been provided with, roughly 12 months beforehand.
The key question is: what had changed? What was different that made something advised to be unambiguously lawful, dealt with through the delegated legislation process —with a clear robust defence from Ministers that it was the right thing to do and entirely in accordance with the measures in the Local Government Act 2000—become unlawful eight or nine months later? There is very little that legal advisers have brought to the Opposition’s attention that suggests that, had the Secretary of State pressed ahead with his decision, placed that decision before Parliament and had Parliament voted for the elections to be cancelled, that would be subject to challenge.
It is clear, however, that in defending a judicial review the Government would have had to set out the correspondence and discussions that they had with all the local authorities that they were putting under such acute pressure to seek the cancellation of the elections. The Opposition are going to be pushing hard to understand what it was that led the Secretary of State to delegate the decision to a different Minister, rather than make it himself as the legislation envisages, and to instead reverse at the last minute, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford noted.
That decision was taken at huge cost and had a huge impact on local authorities, many of which, on the basis of the Government’s assurances, had released the polling stations, told schools that they would now be open on polling day, and had stood down the polling clerks and staff who were not going to be needed because the Government had cancelled the elections. Many had told the police that they could stand down their planned patrols ensuring that those elections could go ahead, because the Government were cancelling. The police now have to put that operation back together at incredibly short notice.
I know that the Minister’s answer to the question of what changed is likely to be that the Government do not discuss the basis of their legal advice. That is a principle that Governments of all parties have stuck to for many years. However, the legal context of the decision made in March 2025—I remind the House that we, as an Opposition, voted against the decision—was that it was lawful and in accordance with custom and practice for the Government to postpone the local elections. What was different when the Secretary of State came to put this decision before Parliament nearly 12 months later? What had changed—other than the grave concern of many Labour council leaders that they were facing a drubbing at the polls—to lead the Secretary of State to decide not to press forward with asking Parliament to agree, through the legislative process, that election cancellation, as he had indicated, in his own judgment, that he would?
I finish with these points: in response to the understandable fury of many local leaders at the mess with which they had been left, the Secretary of State rather hastily announced £63 million of additional—as it was described—“capacity” grant. It would be helpful if the Minister set out, for the benefit of the House, what guidance has been given for the use of that capacity grant. It sounds rather like the amount that would be required to set the elections back up again at very short notice, expensive as that would be.
I reflect on the words of one of the Minister’s predecessors, the hon. Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton. He spoke in Parliament in a debate on an urgent question. He described himself as “blunt” and said:
“Local leaders across the political spectrum have worked in good faith.”
I agree. He—a former Minister of this Government—said:
“They have put aside self-interest and differences, and they did everything asked of them to secure a better settlement for the people they represent.”
He concluded, regarding this Government’s actions, that
“we need to be better than this.”—[Official Report, 4 December 2025; Vol. 776, c. 1166-1167.]
Does this Minister agree?
The Minister for Local Government and Homelessness (Alison McGovern)
It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) for leading this debate, and thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed to it. I also thank the more than 100,000 people who signed the petition that has brought us here. Their engagement, as hon. Members have said, reflects the strength of feeling about local democracy, the future of local councils and the changes needed to get public services and stronger economic growth across England.
I stood to be a local councillor 20 years ago this year—standing for election for the first time. I remember it as a humbling and important experience. I share the views of all hon. Members about the foundational nature of democracy. I grew up in the Wirral. Some 52 years ago we had quite a number of councils there and it was part of Cheshire, but when I was born we had a unitary council, so I was born in Merseyside. Now, we are part of the Liverpool city region, with a metro mayor, so I am personally aware of how change can affect areas.
On the question of whether people demand mayors, the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) made the reasonable point most people are focused on the bread and butter. However, in my experience, having had a mayor for some years, the people I represent have felt and seen the benefit of that. I say to the right hon. Member, “Watch this space.”
I begin by acknowledging the concerns raised by the petitioners and expressed in this debate. Democratic legitimacy matters profoundly. People must have confidence that their vote counts and their voice is heard. They must also have confidence that the structures into which representatives are elected are sustainable, capable and fit to deliver the services on which communities rely. The hon. Member for Woking (Mr Forster) and I have engaged several times in this House—and will continue to engage—about the points that he rightly makes about Woking’s debt and what we must do to guard against such things happening again in future. Our responsibility is to safeguard both.
In many parts of the country, residents continue to live with a two-tier system that is inefficient, confusing and poorly suited to the demands of the modern state. That is why the Government are undertaking the most ambitious programme of local government reorganisation in half a century. We are replacing outdated two-tier arrangements with simpler single-tier unitary councils that are better equipped to take decisions quickly, create economic growth and support integrated public services.
This is where I slightly disagree with the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford, because bringing together, for example, housing and social services under a unitary council is a different arrangement. His characterisation of the situation as us not moving away from two tiers because there will still be an Essex-wide body is not quite right. The value of a unitary council is bringing together those services that are now apart. It is not quite the situation that he describes.
Mr Francois
My constituency is pronounced “Rayleigh”, by the way. My advice to the Minister is to cut your losses and drop the whole thing in Essex, because it is a shambles. However, under the Government’s plans we will have a unitary tier, and then a tier above that which is a combined authority drawn from some of those councils and a mayor. It is patently obvious that that is two tiers of local government replacing two different tiers of local government. To pretend that it is one is fantasy.
Alison McGovern
Just as the right hon. Member says—Rayleigh and Wickford.
In bringing together the functions of district and county councils we can integrate public services better. That we still need a strategic tier does not, in my opinion, undermine that argument. That is why with one council responsible for growth, decisions can be taken faster, opportunities seized more confidently and investment aligned behind a coherent long-term vision. This is not a bureaucratic exercise. As I just said to the right hon. Member, when housing, public health, children’s services, adult social care and planning sit within a single organisation, the public benefits. Support services can work around the whole person, not just the element of their life that happens to fall within a particular tier of government.
Nearly a third of England’s population live in areas where responsibility for services is split between two councils, and residents tell us that they struggle to know which council is responsible for what. As I have said previously, one county council recorded more than 140,000 incidents of residents contacting the wrong authority when trying to get help. That is not the public’s failure; it is a failure of a system designed for a different era.
Two-tier government is significantly more expensive than it needs to be, and across the country, taxpayers fund duplicate political and managerial structures: two sets of councillors, leadership teams, finance functions, planning departments and often different electoral cycles. Those inefficiencies waste tens of millions of pounds each year. That money should be directed to social care, children’s services, housing and neighbourhoods.
The petition focuses on one specific aspect of this broader programme of change: the powers available to Ministers to make changes to the timing of local elections in areas undergoing reorganisation. As Members know, the Secretary of State originally concluded, based on extensive representations from councils, that postponement would release essential capacity in 30 areas where councils set out detailed concerns about their ability to deliver complex structural change alongside running full elections. Those decisions were taken case by case, guided by evidence submitted through more than 400 representations, and reflected clear precedents for temporarily aligning electoral cycles with structural transition.
However, following the receipt of further legal advice, the Government have now revoked that decision. A fresh decision was taken quickly to ensure certainty for councils, candidates and voters. A revocation order was laid and, as such, all the elections that had originally been proposed for postponement will now proceed in May 2026. We have written to all affected councils and the Government are working closely with returning officers, administrators and suppliers to provide the practical support required to deliver those elections successfully within the required timetable.
Let me turn to a couple of the questions that Members asked. The hon. Member for Woking and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), asked me about legal considerations that applied to previous decisions. Those previous postponements were legal. As we know, the powers to postpone elections exist in statute and they are unchanged by the most recent decision. In a previous delegated legislative Committee, I committed to write to the hon. Member for Woking, as other Members who were in that Committee will remember. That response will be circulated in the usual way. The shadow Minister himself talked about the way in which Governments of all parties have handled legal advice. I am sure that I do not need to repeat the reasons why we would treat the advice we received in the way that we did; he knows those reasons well.
The hon. Member for Horsham (John Milne) and others mentioned the circumstances in Cheltenham, which show that there are circumstances in which the power that we have discussed today can be used. In addition, the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) mentioned Margaret Thatcher extending and changing the terms of the GLC, so clearly there are circumstances in which it needs to be used.
Finally, a number of Members asked whether we would consider changing the law. The Government will engage with amendments to Bills in the usual way. We recognise, of course, that the reversal of the original decision places additional pressures on councils in reorganisation areas. As has been mentioned, last week the Secretary of State announced up to £63 million in capacity funding, on top of £7.6 million that has already been provided, to support councils to deliver reorganisation effectively. We are in touch with councils directly about those resources.
Let me turn briefly to the petition’s central concern: the powers themselves. Parliament provided these powers for the specific context of structural reform and previous Governments have used them in comparable circumstances, as has already been said today and as I have just mentioned again. However, we fully recognise the strength of interest among Members in how these powers are framed and exercised.
The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, which is now before Parliament, provides an appropriate forum for considering these issues. As I have just mentioned, the Government are considering amendments tabled to that Bill, and will engage with them in the usual parliamentary fashion. I do not intend to prejudge discussions in either House.
Looking ahead, the focus now is on supporting councils to run safe and effective elections in May, and on progressing reorganisation in a way that improves local services and delivers long-term value for money. The new unitary authorities that will follow will eliminate duplication, strengthen accountability and make place planning—including planning for housing, transport, economic development and public services—easier, as it will be within a single strategic framework. The new unitary authorities will also deliver significant savings, estimated at about £40 million a year in allowances and associated costs, with savings of at least £120 million over the first three years, which can be reinvested into frontline services.
Elections matter deeply—they matter to us all—and so does the long-term resilience of local government. Members will be aware that, after the past decade and a half, I have a significant job on my hands to get all local government towards a better and more sustainable future. When further legal advice was received, the Secretary of State acted swiftly to revoke the postponement decision and confirm that elections will proceed in May 2026. The Government remain committed to delivering simpler, stronger councils to serve their communities.
Jamie Stone
As you know, Mr Mundell, I am somewhat long in the tooth, as we say north of the border. I was just doing a wee sum here on a piece of paper—I have contested 11 elections, and I would say that my wife and children do not always greet the prospect of another election with huge enthusiasm, but I know what I am talking about. It seems slightly surreal to me that, once upon a time all those years ago, I was talking at great length in Dingwall about dog poo in some of the towns and villages of the highlands, and now I find myself here having introduced a debate on local government elections.
This evening’s contributions have been very helpful. The Minister in her reply displayed a certain knowledge of local government, which is a comfort, because not everyone understands the whys and wherefores. I want to make two comments. First, in my contribution, I referenced changes being referred to statutory instruments. I argue—but I think this is for another day—that the supervision and examination of statutory instruments is something we could do a little bit better in this place.
The hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) talked about what constituencies should or should not be called. If I wanted to be pedantic I could insist that my constituency be called Caithness, Sutherland, Easter Ross, Wester Ross, the Black Isle and the northern parts of Inverness-shire—but we will not go that way.
I thank all the people who signed the petition. I have to be seen to be even-handed in this debate—as you well know, Mr Mundell—so I shall conclude with simply this: we hold democracy as being very precious in this country, and when we see what is happening in other parts of the world, I think we realise even more so how important that is. Trust in democracy is absolutely vital; if that goes, then we are in trouble.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered e-petition 747234 relating to the Secretary of State’s power to cancel local elections.