Locals 2023: Unpicking the results

Labour, the Lib Dems, and the Greens all winner at the expense of a floundering Conservative Party

As the curtains close on the 2023 English local authority elections, there were certainly multiple winners in this year’s contest - and one very clear loser. The Conservatives suffered tremendous losses, far beyond what would be expected under a normal ‘mid-term blues’ election. Meanwhile, each of the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens left the show with shares of the spoils.

If one thing was clear from the results as they starting coming in on Thursday night through until late on Friday, it was this confirmation of what the national opinion polling has been reporting now for some time: a deep sense of frustration and apathy toward the Conservative Party among the English electorate. Sunak’s party, and his government, are undoubtedly in trouble with the country’s voters.

The early results

One of the most important early stories to emerge from the overnight count came in Plymouth, where it was clear from the first few declarations that Labour was on track to take majority control of a council which has a habit of swinging back and forth between Labour and Conservatives as the national mood changes.

In the end, Plymouth was taken by Labour with a majority of 2 in a result which would turn out to be a bellwether of things to come.

Following key contests also went the way of Labour as counting for the night drew to a close - the party romped home Medway in the South of England, and swept back into power in Brexit-backing Stoke-on-Trent.

They perhaps did not take as many seats in places such as Dudley and North East Lincolnshire as they would have liked, and some strong Green and Liberal Democrat performances kept them away from the majority line in Worcester. Nonetheless, as Conservative seats fell away from successive councils into the small hours, there was no doubting that the overnight results belonged to Keir Starmer and his party.

Lib Dems winning here

It was also evident from those overnight results that the Liberal Democrats were set to have a very good election. Despite defending a very high-watermark in terms of their 2019 performance, Ed Davey’s party signalled their intent early by taking three seats off the Conservatives in Brentwood to move level with the Tories on 17 seats and place the council into No Overall Control.

They went on to put in good performances in the likes of Hull and Cotswold, but struggled somewhat in North Norfolk.

But the real Liberal Democrat headlines were always going to come during Friday’s daytime count. Specifically, from the Blue Wall - that Remain-voting, graduate-heavy, ring of traditional Tory towns and shires surrounding London and extending out into the South West and East of England.

And indeed, Windsor and Maidenhead proving to be the tip of the spear in what would be a series of very difficult counts for the Conservatives across the South and East of England.

The Liberal Democrats flipped no fewer than 13 wards in a council home to former prime minister Theresa May, and the reigning monarch King Charles III, to take majority control.

Each of Stratford-on-Avon, Dacorum, and South Hams would also then fall directly from the Conservatives and into Liberal Democrat hands by the time the counting was through, in a bruising encounter for the governing party in their traditional heartlands and Celtic fringes.

Many of us have long spoken about the demographic and political time bomb sitting underneath incumbent Conservative MPs in the London commuter belt and its eastern and western reaches. A Conservative Party increasingly reaching rightward in an effort to maintain its Brexit coalition is straining its relationship with an ever younger, higher educated, liberal electorate in its old southern stomping grounds.

The evidence from last night, and indeed for the last few local election cycles, suggest that the effects of this are already making their mark heavily on English local authority elections.

Correlation and causation

As part of our results coverage, the BBC psephology team (led by Professor Sir John Curtice) produces analysis and summaries of how the parties performed in different areas and with different types of wards and councils.

While we cannot say anything directly about voter behaviour by studying aggregate results (that would be an ecological fallacy), robust correlations across our 794 ‘key wards’ can give indications of the patterns and particularities that underpin the overall results.

One of the most striking relationships in the data was how the Labour to Conservative ‘Butler swing’ correlated with the prevalence of pensioners within ward populations.

Namely, the higher the percentage of those aged 65 and over at the ward level, the more the swing increased toward Labour (indicated by negative figures on the graph below, as Butler swing is calculated as Con change - Lab change, divided by two) on Thursday.

Areas with high numbers of pensioners swinging away from the Conservatives and toward Labour is a stark reversal of trends we have been observing at both local authority and Westminster elections for a number of cycles, and is very likely connected to a wider untangling of the ‘Brexit realignment’ (which seems now to have peaked in 2021).

Another important correlation we picked out on the night was the relationship between Labour improvements on 2019 and the share of people in working class occupations at the ward level.

In yet another apparent reversal of trends we had being seeing for many years, whereby Labour were gaining more (or sometimes, dropping less) with those in professional occupations and from middle class areas, Labour this time were racking up more votes in areas with more people from working class backgrounds.

In BBC ‘key wards’ with more than 13% of the population working in routine occupations (according to the 2021 Census), Labour’s vote went up by an average of 6.7 points on 2019. In areas where this share was less than 7%, the change was only 4.8%.

The relationship is even more stark when we compare to the 2021 baseline - the last local election in which the Conservatives came out ‘on top’. Labour vote share change (versus 2021) in areas with the highest proportion of routine occupation workers was 6.1%, compared to 1.8% in those with the fewest.

On the other hand, versus their 2021 baseline the Conservatives were down no less than 8.3 points in areas with the highest prevalence of routine occupation workers, but down just 5.3 points in wards with the fewest.

This evidence suggests that the Conservative vote is falling away fastest in England’s most working class communities.

There was more bad news for Sunak’s party in terms of its mission to hold on to Leave voters who the party had so successfully won over in the years since the Brexit referendum. Throughout these results, Conservative decline correlated pretty strongly with estimated Brexit vote share at the ward level.

Below, we can clearly see that the Conservative change since their high watermark of 2021 and the 2023 results correlated negatively with estimated Leave share.

Labour on the other hand did significantly better in areas with higher Leave voting. On 2021, they were no less than 7.4 points up where the estimated 2016 leave vote was higher than 63%. Their vote went up by just 1.3 points on 2021 where the leave share was below 40%.

To illustrate the contrasting fortunes of the parties in this regard, the Conservative vote was down a whopping 13.6 points in the highest leave voting areas but only 6.8 points in the most Remain areas.

The overall Labour performance

As we moved further into Friday afternoon, Labour continued to quietly rack up significant swings and seat wins in councils covering key Westminster marginal constituencies; Milton Keynes, High Peak, Worthing, Darlington, the list went on.

There were also impressive results in Derbyshire and of course the symbolic capture of Swindon council directly from Conservative control - previously seen by some as perhaps a little out of reach for Labour this time around.

There were some disappointments, no doubt. Losing Slough council to the Conservatives would have been something of shock, bucking the national trend. They also made little to no progress in areas such as Hyndburn, Hull, and Sheffield.

But the overall picture was nonetheless very good for Starmer and his party, who will no doubt take delight that the Conservative performance dropped below their own ‘expectations management’ figure of 1000 net losses that was fed out ahead of Thursday.

Projected National Spoils

By the time the BBC’s Projected National Share (PNS) was released on Friday afternoon, the Conservatives were losing councils like Bracknell Forest to Labour and Dacorum to the Liberal Democrats, and steamrollering toward that 1000 net losses marker (which they would eventually hit on Friday evening).

The PNS models party support in the areas which did vote in a given local authority election and then projects it across the country to create a national figure.

It does so by assuming that everyone in areas not holding elections would have behaved the same way as those that did, and using regression models to figure out what kind of result we would have expected if all the various different types of councils were voting. This year’s figures were:

Labour 35%

Conservatives 26%

Lib Dems 20%

Others 19%

On this metric, Labour were well up on 2019 (+8pts) and 2021 (+7pts), but completely static on 2022.

The Conservatives were down on each of 2019 (-2pts), 2021 (-10pts), and 2022 (-4pts).

What does this imply for the state of the parties as we gear up toward a probable autumn 2024 General Election contest?

Labour’s 9 point lead was their best performance in a national equivalent vote at a local election since they lost power in 2010.

The 20% figure for the Liberal Democrats represented another notch in their recovery post, though still left them some way off the heydays of former leaders Kennedy and Ashdown.

For the Conservatives, this year’s PNS signals two successive years of significant drops in their vote share. Not the sort of momentum Sunak would be hoping for as he tries to plot a path toward defending the Conservative parliamentary majority in 2024.

Of course, the specific voting patterns would not replicate at a General Election, and so we must not read the PNS as some kind of benchmark or expectation for a Westminster contest.

The correct way to understand and apply the PNS is to compare it to the same metric for other years (see above), and - for opposition parties - benchmark their progress at the same point in the midterm election cycle against opposition parties who would go on to oust the incumbents.

With that in mind, the PNS above suggests Labour are currently on course, but by absolutely no means guaranteed, to win the next General Election - in some form.

Though a good marker in the sand, a nine point lead is not the sort of thumping victories that Tony Blair or David Cameron were recording as leaders of their respective parties before going on to win office, which is something Labour will have to consider.

But they have nonetheless managed first to grow and then to maintain their popular support with the local authority electorate over the last two years, while their Conservative rivals have dropped away considerably (a sum of -14pts).

On the other side of the divide, the Prime Minister will need to arrest and reverse this trajectory very quickly if he is to have any hope of staying in Number 10 after the next election.

Green gains

A special mention must go to the Green Party, who despite defending their record 2019 result still managed to win an extra 250 council seats up and down the country - including taking majority control of a council for the first time in rural Mid-Suffolk.

They also became the largest party in East Suffolk, Warwick, and Folkestone and Hythe, but did suffer disappointment in Brighton where they lost a raft of seats to an ultimately victorious Labour Party.

The Greens continue to diversify their electoral coalition and local authority representation in England. Gone are the days of a party largely only challenging Labour for urban seats and progressive, younger voters. Now, the Green Party threatens - and wins - all sorts of voters in all sorts of places.