On May 7 2026, voters in England, Scotland and Wales will head to the polls. Parliamentary elections are taking place in the devolved Welsh Senedd Cymru and Scottish Parliament, and local elections for over 4,850 councillor roles could have huge implications for local governments throughout England. With all to play for, we asked five experts to tell us what they will be keeping their eye on.
Can Reform compete across the UK?
Jonathan Tonge, Professor of Politics, University of Liverpool
The 2026 elections will reveal whether Reform UK will peak as an English nationalist party, or if they can compete as a genuine nationwide force. Last year’s local elections confirmed that Reform can seriously harm the Conservatives. This year, contests are across councils held mainly by Labour, making the English elections about Reform’s threat to Keir Starmer’s party.
Nigel Farage’s party, which currently has eight MPs, has led opinion polls in England since May 2025, when it won the highest vote in English local elections. Reform took control of ten councils (from a starting point of zero), and gained nearly 700 new councillors. Of these, eight were county council gains from the Conservatives, with another taken from a Liberal Democrat-led coalition. The tenth gain was from Labour in the only metropolitan borough contested, Doncaster.
Reform’s likely gains in English councils aren’t guaranteed elsewhere in the UK however. The party’s polling in Scotland is around ten percentage points behind what it is in England. It may be that Reform is battling Labour for second place, while the Scottish National Party (SNP) continues to dominate.
Reform’s polling in Wales is higher (in the mid-to-high-20% range) but again, the real battle is with Labour for runner-up, as Plaid Cymru seems set to top the poll.
Wangkun Jia/shutterstock, trabantos/shutterstock, Juan Garcia Hinojosa/Shutterstock
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Local results could force tricky coalitions
Alex Nurse, Reader in Urban Planning, University of Liverpool
Local elections are often concerned with local issues – think potholes and bin collections. Councils are also obliged by law to spend a lot of their time and budget on initiatives like adult social care, but these issues are often lost in the broad brush strokes of election campaigns.
It will be interesting to see how the ascendant Greens and Reform present their vision for local government, and what compromises they make to win over local voters. In the recent Gorton and Denton byelection, Green candidate Hannah Spencer made scarce mention of the environment and instead focused heavily on the cost of living and the broader social contract. Similarly, Reform’s promise to mimic the US Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) following the 2025 elections came up short after its newly elected councillors found local authorities already cut to the bone from years of austerity.
I’ll also be watching to see how the fragmented opinion polls translate into council seats. While we might be expecting a wipeout for Labour and the Conservatives, it remains to be seen how many councils the other parties will win wholesale, and where there will be situations of no overall control, requiring tricky coalition building. This might involve attempts to form a coalition of like-minded councillors, as seen in Bristol. However, the reality is often that parties attempt to go it alone, by entering minority government and living vote by vote, as seen in places like Sheffield or Wirral.
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Challenges to inclusive Scottish identity
Murray Leith, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Migration, Diaspora, Citizenship and Identity, University of the West of Scotland
The SNP has long predicated its sense of national identity on a civic and inclusive
Scottishness. Its message throughout the past 19 years has been that anyone who believes in Scotland can be Scottish. While other parliamentary parties have challenged and attacked myriad SNP platforms and policies in the last two decades, none disagree with this political elite consensus.
However, this agreement has not been as duly accepted by people in Scotland who
are less accepting of incomers and migrants (from the rest of the UK and beyond) claiming Scottish identity. Scotland has shifted from an emigrant nation to an immigrant nation in recent years. Without immigration, Scotland’s population would have shrunk. While migration policy remains reserved to Westminster, it looms large in the minds of voters – so much so, that the SNP has made devolving immigration power to Scotland one of its 14 key manifesto pledges.
Reform UK is openly challenging this inclusive and welcoming political consensus. In his first speech, Malcolm Offord, Reform’s Scottish leader spoke of strangers and uncontrolled immigration destabilising communities. Given recent polling and the possibility that Reform may be the official opposition in the next Scottish parliament, the SNP may soon be facing an opposition that proposes a less inclusive vision of Scottishness.
jeremy sutton-hibbert/Alamy
A potentially huge turnover on councils
Hannah Bunting, Senior Lecturer in Quantitative British Politics and Co-director of The Elections Centre, University of Exeter
In the English local elections, I’m keeping an eye out for how many incumbents lose their seats. We know that voters are disillusioned with the two main parties and looking for alternatives. Last year in the 2025 locals, and in many council byelections since, less than 40% of Labour and Conservative incumbents were re-elected. According to our data at The Elections Centre, this figure hasn’t dropped below 70% since 1973.
There are also many more vacancies this year compared to 2025, with Labour defending half of the nearly 5,000 up for grabs, and the Conservatives defending another quarter of them. If this rate of losses continues, we are going to see thousands of new councillors elected, with huge implications for local governments.
Two Labour strongholds, Sunderland and Barnsley, are currently polling in favour of Reform, as is Walsall, which has been held by the Conservatives since 2004. The Greens are making headway in the inner boroughs of London, and councils with “no overall control” may be more common than ever in the capital after these contests. Labour has the furthest to fall, and all eyes will be on how many gains Reform and the Greens make, alongside how many areas turn to the Liberal Democrats as an alternative.
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A proportional system in the Senedd
Anwen Elias, Reader in Politics, Aberystwyth University
Changes to the way Welsh voters elect the Senedd – a proportional system where one vote is cast for a political party’s list of candidates across 16 new constituencies – will require parties to campaign very differently compared to previous elections. The extent to which they can adapt will affect how they perform.
Under the previous electoral system, most Senedd members (40 out of 60) were elected under first-past-the-post, with the rest elected through proportional regional lists. There was an incentive to focus attention and resources on key seats where a political party had the best chances of winning. Under the new system parties will need to gain support from across Wales if they want to ensure a strong presence in the Senedd.
This requires a different kind of campaign strategy and organisation, which is likely to be especially challenging for parties with fewer resources. Within constituencies – some of which are huge – political parties will have to mobilise activists in areas where historically they might not have had a much presence or electoral support. Parties with the available resources for a coordinated national campaign and a strong media, and social media, presence will have a clear advantage under this new system.
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