Re:View 16 January 2026
Director of Policy and Research
Democracy can be mighty inconvenient, can’t it?
This week we had confirmation that 25 councils – that’s around a third of those eligible – are going to take the Government up on an offer to postpone their elections for a year. That’s something in the region of 2.5 million voters who will have to wait to cast their votes. In some places, the councillors they elect in 2027 will now only serve for a year before reorganisation changes everything again.
This is in addition to the further postponement of elections for four of the regions electing Mayors for the first time in the “Devolution Priority Programme”, announced late last year. Originally heralded as an “ambitious” timetable for “fast track” devolution “delivered at pace”, the planned 2026 mayoral elections will now all take place in either 2027 or 2028.
Both of these moves have been met with consternation. In the case of the extended delays to new mayoral elections, some of the officers involved in the race to get their areas ready were furious about having wasted their efforts. And, very predictably, there are now plenty of people who accuse this unpopular Government of simply being afraid to face the voters.
The rationale is that the project of root-and-branch reorganisation underway in some places ought to be brought closer to completion before elections take place – that elections would distract from that work, or (by inference) that a shift in council leadership at the wrong moment could derail this structural objective altogether.
As inconvenient as such disruption may be for Government plans… isn’t this the point of democracy? If reorganisation plans don’t enjoy local legitimacy, we ought to know sooner rather than later, and there are few ways of finding out more concretely than an election result that might bring in an administration of reorganisation-sceptics.
The wider issue is that local democracy is not exactly in rude health. Turnout in local elections is low. Name recognition of local representatives and leaders is poor. Reorganisation and devolution are both, in part, attempts to remedy the local democratic deficit, through direct election of a more visible, singular mayor and the streamlining and clarification of local public services.
Delaying elections can only further harm the connection between voters and their local institutions: a bad outcome from any perspective.