Welcome to the March 2025 edition of Democracy Club’s regular newsletter. All past emails are accessible in an online archive.

We’re well into the local election campaign period now, with candidate lists due to be published on 2 April.

1 May local elections

Local elections are scheduled to take place in some areas of England on 1 May. 1,657 councillors are due to be elected, across 1,406 wards in 24 councils. There will also be six mayoral elections, including four ‘metro mayors’ and two local authority mayors. Nine councils have had their elections postponed ahead of proposed reorganisation. Read a full summary (with maps!) on our blog.

But that’s not all! There are 91 additional English council by-elections taking place on 1 May, with 93 seats up for grabs. This takes the total number of councillors elected on 1 May to 1,748. Of these 91 by-elections, 13 are for vacancies in councils which have had their scheduled elections postponed.

There will also be elections to 1,274 English town and parish councils (11,863 councillors). We do not cover these councils in our lookup, but will be publishing a summary of the results after May.

The election timetable

Candidate lists will be published after 4pm on 2 April, and we’ll have these all on WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk by the end of the week. Voter registration deadline is 11 April, and postal vote application deadline is 14 April.

Are you standing?

Are you a candidate or helping someone else to campaign? WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk offers a free profile for every candidate to put their case to the electorate. All you need to do to edit the database is sign up for an account using an email address. You can then add or edit your own profile, or those of other candidates from your party. Instructions on how to update your profile can be found here: https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/standing/

Volunteer for democracy

Anyone can add information to our election candidate database, which serves nonpartisan information to hundreds of thousands of voters every year. Details on using the site can be found on the volunteer page. Log in on the evening of 2 April to help check and publish candidate lists - a link on the front page will guide you through the process.

All the best,

The Democracy Club Team