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

The May 2025 local elections

English local elections will be held in 24 councils on 1 May, after the government announced postponements in nine areas to allow for the creation of new unitary authorities. Elections in these areas are now likely to be held in May 2026.

The nine councils were due to elect 599 councillors, reducing the number up for election on 1 May by 26.6%; 1,657 council seats remain up for grabs. There will also be four combined authority and two local authority mayoral elections. We are updating our systems and will be giving information about these postponements to users of our election lookup.

The government have also announced that new devolution proposals will be pursued in six areas of England, with the intention of holding mayoral elections next year. You can read the full ministerial statement on the UK parliament website.

Parish matters

A different tier of local government now, as we’ve partnered with the National Association of Local Councils to produce some data and analysis on last year’s English town and parish council elections. To our knowledge, parish electoral data has never been collected and published like this before, so it’s something of an exclusive!

446 town and parish councils held elections in May 2024; 4,207 seats were up for grabs across 795 different wards. NALC have published a summary on their website, and we’ve a full breakdown of the data on our blog.

Election leaflets

We’re excited to share the latest update to ElectionLeaflets.org, our open database of election literature stretching back to 2009. Thanks to a grant from Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, we’ve been able to dedicate time to working on it for the first time since it launched. The site now allows users to browse and filter the leaflets by political party, UK nation or region, and date, as well as search by candidate name. Give it a go, and let us know what you think! We’ll have a full update and formal relaunch of the project next month.

Elections to watch

24 council by-elections are scheduled for the coming month, including three councils which are holding two elections apiece. As usual, you can see all upcoming elections on the front page of WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk.

All the best,

The Democracy Club Team