The elections held across the UK on 7 May 2026 produced a series of dramatic outcomes, and the political ramifications of those results are still playing out.

Different areas of Britain vote differently, and each year’s local elections happen in different parts of the country. If a party does well in the local elections, it might just be that elections were happening in areas where their supporters are more likely to live.

So, in my last article, I suggested keeping an eye on two sets of data produced by separate academics after the English local election results were in. Both datasets have been running for around 45 years, and both seek to do the same thing – estimate the vote share each party might have got if local elections had taken place across the whole of Britain, rather than just in certain parts of it.

The Projected National Share (PNS) is produced by Professor Sir John Curtice for the BBC and the National Equivalent Vote (NEV) is produced by Professors Rallings and Thrasher for Sky News.

We expected that both measures would indicate that UK public opinion is now unprecedentedly fragmented, with support spread more thinly across more parties than ever before. This is exactly what happened.

Professor Sir John Curtice’s Projected National Share

The results of the May 2026 PNS are as follows:

Reform UK: 26%
Greens: 18%
Conservatives: 17%
Labour: 17%
Liberal Democrats: 16%
Others: 6%

May 2025’s PNS was the first in which five parties scored over 10%. One year on and five parties have scored over 15%.

Other things to note are as follows:

• The 26% received by Reform UK is the lowest recorded by any largest party in the history of the PNS series. The previous lowest was the 28% recorded by both Labour and the Conservatives, in May 2019.
• It is the first time in the history of the PNS that neither Labour nor the Conservatives feature in the top two parties. The Greens are in second place, with 18%.
• There is only 10-points between the first placed party (Reform UK: 26%) and the fifth-placed party (Liberal Democrats: 16%).

Although not showing quite as fragmented a picture as the PNS, the NEV still breaks a number of records.

Rallings and Thrasher’s National Equivalent Vote

The results of May 2025’s NEV are as follows:

Reform UK: 27%
Conservatives: 20%
Labour: 15%
Greens: 14%
Liberal Democrats: 14%
Others: 10%

Things to note are as follows:

• The 27% received by Reform UK is the lowest recorded by any largest party in the history of the NEV series. The previous lowest was the 29% recorded by Labour, in May 2013.
• It is the first time in the history of the NEV that five parties received more than 10% of votes.
• There is only 13-points between the first placed party (Reform UK: 27%) and the fifth-placed parties (Greens: 14%; Liberal Democrats: 14%).

The different order of the parties in the NEV and PNS just shows the impact a few percentage points has when the parties are so close together. These data sets don’t mean that, for instance, Reform UK would win 26% or 27% of MPs in a UK general election. With First Past the Post it’s really complicated for voters to work out how their votes will translate into representation.

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Random results from England’s local elections

There are numerous examples of this multi-party politics playing out in individual council elections across England, with seat after seat seeing the largest party receiving the support of barely a third of local voters. With these sorts of voting patterns, First Past the Post throws out some pretty random and bizarre results, making it hard for voters to know how votes will tranlate to representation in their area. A flavour from last week’s local elections are below:

• Sefton = Lab majority (55% of seats), with 29% of votes*
• Calderdale = Reform UK majority (63% of seats), with 31% of votes
• East Surrey = Lib Dem majority (56% of seats), with 28% of votes
• Bexley = Conservative majority (64% of seats), with 33% of votes
• Lewisham = Green majority (74% of seats), with 42% of votes

Many councillors are elected in wards where each voter has as many votes as there are positions to be filled. When some voters have 2 votes and others 3, and some decide to not cast all their votes as well, you can’t simply add up all the votes to calculate the vote shares. For councils with wards that elect more than one councillor (multi-member wards), we have calculated vote shares by using the number of votes for each party’s best-placed candidate in each ward. This is the approach taken by local election experts Professors Rallings & Thrasher of The Elections Centre, a major resource for local election data in the UK.

Now that the elections are over, we will continue to keep a close eye on the opinion polls and see where our multi-party politics heads next.

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This week we’ve been delving into the English local election results to understand what’s happening behind the headlines, and the picture that is emerging is a mixed one.

Whilst the general talk is about winners and losers from the elections – and there is no question that the electoral system that served the two largest parties so well has turned into a threat to them – the real story exists within individual council contests. Here the fragmenting of the party system is having wildly different effects in different places, with real consequences for voters in how their choices are turned into representation. The lottery elections that we have long predicted are here.

Fragmentation – what does it mean under First Past the Post

There are, of course, plenty of examples of disproportional results, where one party has managed to scoop up a significant majority of seats on sometimes as little as a third, or even less, of the votes. This is typical of a lot of local elections under First Past the Post – one party often takes all three seats in a multi-member ward, despite not getting close to a majority of votes in the ward and goes on to win majority control of the council. With more parties in play, those winning vote shares get even smaller.

It is also not unusual to see ‘wrong winner’ elections, where the party with the most votes across the council area does not end up with the most seats. This year Wandsworth delivered such a result with the Conservatives gaining more seats than Labour on a lower vote share. The opposite happened in Croydon where Labour was the ‘wrong winner’ in the council chamber, though this was somewhat negated by the Conservatives retaining the Croydon elected mayor, on a very low vote share of 30.7%, just one percentage point ahead of the Labour candidate.

First Past the Snakes and First up the Ladders

But other dynamics are now in play as the party system fragments and the results get ever more random. We are used to the First Past the Post system bonus which sees parties get far more seats than their vote share, creating those disproportional results. Correspondingly there’s the First Past the Post system penalty in which other parties get far fewer seats than their vote share. But we are now seeing much more random version of this – it’s First Past the Post snakes and ladders.

Take Newcastle Upon Tyne. Here the Lib Dems (22.3% vote share), Reform UK (22.9%) and the Green Party (25.7%) were all close to each other on vote share and received a similar number of seats. The Lib Dems got one seat more despite having the lower vote share of the three, but even more strikingly, Labour, not far behind on 17.1% dropped out the running entirely, retaining just two seats. The five-percentage point deficit to their nearest contender saw them sliding down the First Past the Post snake.

200 miles down the road in Newcastle Under Lyme a different game played out but with the same result for Labour. Reform UK benefitted from a significant First Past the Post winner’s bonus getting 61.4% of the seats from 38.7% of the vote and taking control of the council. The Conservatives lost control of the council but on 26.2% of the vote retained 15 seats (34.1%) whilst Labour on 20.8% vote share was reduced to just 2 seats (4.5%).

In London, the Greens landed on the First Past the Post snake in Hammersmith and Fulham (18.6% vote share, no seats) and Barking and Dagenham (21.8% vote share, four seats (7.8%)) but reached the ladder in Lewisham, taking 74.1% of seats on 42% of votes. Similar mixed fortunes for all parties played out across the local elections. No seats for the Conservatives in Sutton for their 17% vote share, just five seats (7.6%) for Reform in Sefton for their 25% of vote share.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day

Then there is the most random of all – the fluke First Past the Post proportional outcome. This was the case in Birmingham, the UK’s largest council with 101 seats up for grabs and where five parties and many independent candidates were in the running across the city creating highly fragmented contests. The Greens, Reform UK and Independent candidates all gained seats on the council whilst Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats managed to hold on in some areas. This time around the distribution of votes in particular areas led to a bizarrely proportional outcome, almost as proportional a result as it is possible to get!

What does it mean for Westminster?

Back in 2017 we called our General Election report Volatile Voting, Random Results highlighting how the increased party system fragmentation we saw emerging in 2010 and 2015 was leading to odd outcomes under First Past the Post. In 2024 this fragmentation led to the most disproportional election in British history. In a piece in the Economist last year, the system was described as ‘slot machine’ politics where “voting is becoming a high-stakes, wildly unpredictable gamble”.

Whereas before we have seen significant fragmentation in votes, followed by business as usual in Westminster seats, we are now seeing a wider variety of impacts at the local council level, often resulting in random outcomes. For parties, small differences in vote share, and in those of their opponents, can result in vastly different outcomes. For voters, there is little chance that their wishes will rationally translate into representation in elected chambers.

The question that hangs over these election results is, of course, what does this mean for the next General Election? The answer to that is simply, we can’t know. Under First Past the Post, the future of our country is on the roll of a dice – welcome to the democracy casino.

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Coverage of elections down in England can often give the impression that results which are wildly different from the way people vote is just a fact of nature, or at most a strange quirk of the voting system, rather than a political choice.   

We saw that with the general election in 2024 and the local elections they have just had. But up here in Scotland, the decision was made at the founding of the Scottish Parliament that Holyrood should be Scotland in miniature, with the share of MSPs a party holds in direct relationship with their share of popular support. 

Since its inception, Holyrood has used the Additional Member System (AMS) to elect Members of the Scottish Parliament. Voters get two ballot papers, one for their constituency, which is elected using Westminster’s First Past the Post (FPTP) system, and the other for regional representation, elected using the closed list system. The system is designed to make the final shape of Holyrood broadly mirror the votes cast across the country on the regional ballots.

2026 Holyrood Election Results

As the results show, the SNP are the largest party once again. Their sweep of the First Past the Post constituency seats means that they didn’t need to pick up regional seats. The opposite is true for the Scottish Greens, Scottish Labour, Conservatives and Reform UK, who didn’t do so well in the constituencies and needed regional representation to make their share of MSPs closer to their share of the vote.

But the flaws inherent in First Past the Post that allowed this sweep of the constituency seats on 38.2% of the vote, makes it impossible for the List seats to properly make up the difference. 

In fact, the result was the most disproportional in the history of the Scottish Parliament. This can be measured with the political scientists Loosemore and Hanby’s Deviation from Vote score (DV Score): the lower the number, the closer the result to how we voted. This election saw a score of 17.8, while the average across the first 6 Holyrood elections was 10.7. 

The election also saw the highest ever over-representation of the largest party. The SNP was over-represented by 17.8 percentage points, while the average over-representation of the largest party across the first 6 Holyrood elections was 8.4 points. This was also the first time only one party had an overall seat share bigger than their List vote share.

Even with these records being broken, the results are still more proportional than every equivalent score at the seven UK General Elections in Scotland held between 2001 & 2024.  

As is the norm for the Scottish Parliament, no majority was received by any one party. As a result, it is likely that the SNP will install a minority government and continuously work with opposition MSPs from the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, Scottish Greens, and potentially even the Conservatives to pass key bills.

What if Scotland had First Past the Post?

If the result were decided only using Westminster’s First Past the Post voting system, the SNP would have a huge parliamentary majority. Not because the majority of Scottish voters voted for them but because First Past the Post rewards coming first in enough places rather than winning overall support.

The SNP won 38.2% of the constituency votes, and 78% of constituency seats.

The consequences of this system are playing out in front of us. In Westminster, the Labour government in 2024 received two thirds of the parliamentary seats on only a third of the national vote share. Millions of voters were left without meaningful representation.

As we’ve seen AMS doesn’t eliminate these distorted results entirely – two thirds of the seats at Holyrood are still elected using First Past the Post – but the regional lists act as shock absorbers for these random results produced under First Past the Post.

Minority government is the system working

As mentioned, having ‘no clear majority’ is something not easily understood in Westminster but in Scotland – and Wales – it is the norm. This is because proportional voting systems do not gloss over reality and pretend that the general public are entirely unified in their political opinions.

As Holyrood uses a system that accurately reflects the way people vote, coalition and cooperation agreements in Edinburgh are the norm, and the result is a different kind of politics. Leaders are expected to work with their colleagues across the political spectrum. They negotiate and build agreement.

When compared to the government in Westminster, the difference is noticeable. Whilst the Labour Party won a huge majority, they have always struggled with legitimacy because they did not possess the support of the majority of the nation.

England’s growing mismatch

These results in Scotland are all the more important now as England is changing. The two-party system no longer exists, five-party politics looks to be there to stay. However, the voting system hasn’t caught up.

If we refuse to recognise that First Past the Post cannot keep up with these changes in voting patterns then our parliaments in Westminster will be even more random and governments will rely on even smaller shares of the vote and be even more fragile.

Scotland sets a different standard; voters have a range of views, and their government reflects that diverse range. The responsibility is on the politicians to work together in the best interests of the entire population, not to play one part of the country off another or claim a mandate that was never actually given.

The flaws of Scotland’s voting system make up the entirety of Westminster’s. Scotland’s system isn’t perfect, but it is recognisably fairer than Westminster’s. 

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On Thursday 7th May, Wales headed to the polls for the Senedd election. This was an election that delivered seismic change for Wales; seeing Welsh Labour lose their position as the largest party in the Senedd for the first time ever, and putting Plaid Cymru in government, with Reform UK Wales as the official opposition.

The new Senedd has 43 Plaid Cymru MSs, 34 Reform MSs, nine Labour MSs, seven Conservative MSs, two Green MSs and one Lib Dem Member.

2026 Welsh Senedd Election Results

How did the new voting system fare?

Beyond the headline results, we saw a new voting system used for the election, with all 96 Members of the Senedd elected via the Closed List electoral system for the first time. Under this system, parties put up lists of candidates in each of the 16 new constituencies across Wales. Voters were able to endorse a party’s list of candidates or vote for an independent.

From its inception in 1999 to 2021, 60 members sat in Cardiff Bay, elected using an Additional Member (AMS) System, which saw 40 seats elected using First Past the Post (FPTP) and topped up with 20 regional list seats elected under Closed Lists. The new system to elect a larger Senedd was intended to be a more proportional one, and manage the 96 Members on an equal mandate ending the practice of having a combination of constituency and regional MSs.

To establish whether this system was more proportional than the previous one, a score can be calculated, which is referred to as a DV score. Essentially, the lower the score the more proportional an election. For the 2026 Senedd election the DV score (using the Loosemore-Hanby DV method) is 15.5, which puts it around average for the DV score for the previous Senedd election’s list votes compared with seats in the previous Senedds. This means that in 2026 the Closed List system behaved much in the same way as it has done in previous Senedd elections on this measure.

Comparing this with a UK General Election in Wales demonstrates how much more proportional this system is than the Westminster system. The Welsh results at the UK General Election had a DV score of 47.4 and over a similar timeframe have an average of 29.3.

Interestingly, the over-representation of the largest party is the lowest in any Senedd election to date (9.4 points). This compares to an average of 13.7 points across the first 6 Senedd elections and is the first time this figure has been under 10 points.

That isn’t to say that everyone is happy with this system. ERS has always been critical of its lack of voter choice and the fact that voters are unable to directly elect an individual from a party list. An alternative system, the Single Transferable Vote, was the one recommended by both a panel of experts and a previous Senedd committee, yet wasn’t put in place for this election. A review mechanism could now be used to tweak or change the Closed List system ahead of the 2030 elections, but it is currently too early to say whether MSs will vote to establish this or have the mandate to affect any changes.

How does this measure up with English local elections?

Compared with some of the other elections held last Thursday the Senedd election was much better able to manage the fragmentation we are seeing across the UK. With local elections in England held under FPTP on the same day we have a direct comparison for how different voting systems handle voters’ wishes.

Thursday’s council elections in England produced a string of disproportional results. In South Cambridgeshire the Liberal Democrats won 95.6% of seats on 41.6% of the vote, while in Wandsworth the Conservatives garnered the most seats despite winning fewer votes than Labour. There are also examples; of where parties who won a similar percentage of the vote to Plaid Cymru in the Senedd election (35.4%) have benefited hugely under FPTP, such as Havering where Reform UK won 70.9% of the seats on 36.3% of the vote. Across a number of councils, large swathes of voters – over a third in some cases – ending up with no representation at all.

Within this context the proportional representation systems that we have seen used in Wales and Scotland (which used AMS for its election last week) have held up much better. While the Welsh system could be improved, particularly in terms of giving voters a direct link with their representatives, it has been able to deliver a much more proportional result than those we’ve seen in England.

A look ahead

While the dust hasn’t even begun to settle on the Senedd election, voters will be back to the ballot box in just a year’s time for the Welsh local authority elections. While we’ve had PR for the Senedd, those elections will still be held under FPTP and may cause parties much more of a headache if we see anything like the disproportionality we have just seen in England’s local elections. If parties want to look to avoid replicating the problems we’ve seen in England, then time is of the essence to ensure FPTP becomes a thing of the past in Wales.

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The votes from last week’s local council elections across England have now been counted, and one thing is clear: First Past the Post is yet again failing to reflect voters’ views on who should run their local council.

People vote in local elections because they want to shape what happens where they live. Whether it’s protecting local services, improving their neighbourhoods, or changing the direction of their area, voters head to the ballot box expecting their voice to matter.

But once again, the results across England are showing how badly the First Past the Post voting system fails to reflect what voters actually wanted. Instead of councils that are shaped by the views of the communities they serve, England’s voting system too often produces results that hand overwhelming power to one party without majority support from voters.

Too many council results simply do not reflect how people voted

Our team has been analysing the results and there are some key examples of where the councils bear very little resemblance to how people actually voted.

In Hammersmith and Fulham, Labour have over three quarters of the seats on little over a third of the vote.

It’s a similar story in Havering, as Reform picked up 71% of the seats on just 36% of the vote share.

And in Sutton, the results are stark. The Liberal Democrats have taken almost all the seats on the Council with a minority share of the vote.

In Lewisham, the Green Party secured nearly three quarters of seats with just 42% of the votes in the area.

These are very different political stories, but they point to the same problem: First Past the Post distorts election results no matter which party benefits. Ultimately, the voting system is just failing to deliver for the voters.

When coming in second means you come first

First Past the Post is often dubbed a ‘winner takes all system’. The idea is simple: the party that comes first gets the power, even if the majority didn’t vote for them. But remarkably, it cannot even guarantee that the party with the most votes will win the most seats.

This is what happened in Wandsworth, as the Conservatives managed to turn a second place in votes to the most seats in the council.

Because the system counts results ward by ward rather than looking at how people voted across the council area as a whole, seat totals can end up badly distorted. What matters is not simply how many votes a party wins, but where those votes are won and how ‘efficiently’ they are distributed.

First Past the Post is failing voters

When election after election produces the same distorted outcomes, local elections can start to feel less like a meaningful expression of voters’ choices and more like a lottery shaped by the quirks of the voting system.

It’s no wonder that people are left frustrated, feeling powerless. The voting system is creating a disconnect between communities and the councils that represent them.

England doesn’t need to settle for a broken voting system

Across the UK, there are already voting systems that better reflect how people vote.

Northern Ireland has used proportional representation for local council elections since 1973, while Scotland adopted it in 2007. These systems are designed to ensure seats more closely match the votes cast, giving more people a meaningful voice in local decision-making.

It’s high time voters in England got the representation they deserve. Local democracy should be something people can actually use to change their area, not something that leaves them feeling shut out. We need a voting system where local election results better reflect how people vote.

If we want local people to feel connected to the decisions shaping their communities, it’s time to scrap first past the post and finally fairly represent us all in English local government.

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Amid all the political drama over the weekend, with the fallout from the elections and then calls on the Prime Minister to resign, there was also a significant development in the campaign for proportional representation.

On Sunday, members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) voted decisively to reject Westminster’s failing First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system and back a move to proportional representation, marking a historic shift for the Labour-affiliated union.

This was another significant step in the campaign for proportional representation. Not only as CWU is a large union in its own right, but it is also one of the influential ‘big five’ unions affiliated to the Labour Party. This means it has an official link to Labour and role in its policy making processes.

Delegates overwhelmingly passed a motion at the union’s annual conference in Bournemouth warning that “FPTP is producing unrepresentative results and is at crisis point,” also describing it as “unsustainable and dangerous”.

The union cited the government’s move to scrap FPTP for mayoral elections and urged that “there has never been a clearer need to change the First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system in Westminster too.”

FPTP is ‘unstable, dangerous and at crisis point’

The motion called on the union to “reject First Past the Post and support the introduction of a form of Proportional Representation that maintains the constituency link and in which all votes count equally and seats match votes.”

It also called for the government to hold an “independent Commission for Electoral Reform”.

There was an animated debate in the conference hall, which ended with the Union’s executive committee outlining its support for ditching FPTP in favour of PR, and then a large majority of delegates voting in favour.

We were down in Bournemouth with Politics for the Many (which is supported by the ERS), running a stall and talking to delegates about the case for PR.

Following the vote, Ed Baldwin a delegate from the CWU Kent Invicta Branch and a political officer for the south east region who proposed the motion, said:

“First Past the Post no longer reflects those we represent and is producing results that do not match the will of the people.

“The Labour government has already accepted it is broken by scrapping it for mayoral elections. If it distorts democracy there, then it distorts democracy at Westminster too.

“This motion is a demand for fairness, representation and a democracy that works, and CWU has never been afraid to challenge systems that fail working people. It is time for our union to lead and help make proportional representation a reality.”

CWU vote represents a sea change in Labour-affiliated unions on PR

The move highlights the huge shift in the trade union and Labour movement in recent years as CWU becomes the eighth of the 11 Labour-affiliated unions to make electoral reform its official policy. Of the remaining unions, two (Community and NUM) do not have a policy on electoral reform and GMB, also considered one of the big five, is currently opposed.

CWU’s vote comes after Unite, Unison and Usdaw have all voted to back electoral reform in recent years. Sunday’s vote shows how support for ditching First Past the Post has become the overwhelming position in the Labour-affiliated trade union movement.

The impact of growing trade union support for electoral reform has already been seen in the Labour Party as the affiliate unions were key to the passing of the 2022 conference motion supporting the move to proportional representation.

Nancy Platts, Coordinator of the Politics for the Many, the trade union campaign for PR, hailed the vote, saying:

“Trade unionists have always been at the forefront of the fight for fairness and democracy, which is why CWU delegates voted decisively to reject the failing First Past the Post system and back electoral reform.

“It is clear that we cannot continue with a voting system that ignores millions of votes and is producing more and more chaotic results that do not represent the way people have voted.

“CWU’s vote demonstrates how support for proportional representation is now the overwhelming position of the Labour-affiliated unions, with Unite, Unison and Usdaw moving to back electoral reform in recent years.

“This marks a sea change in the Labour movement. The party’s politicians at Westminster now need to listen to these collective voices and act to make electoral reform a reality.”

Find out more about Politics for the Many, the trade union campaign for proportional representation

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While polling can give us an idea of what the public thinks, there is nothing like real votes to test the mood of the country. With elections across large areas of England, plus Scotland and Wales tomorrow, we’ll finally get some real votes to compare recent polling against. While the results in Scotland and Wales will be roughly in line with party vote shares, as they use voting systems that reflect how people vote, local council elections in England are a different story.

England’s First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system is likely to deliver numerous highly disproportional results, with parties possibly taking control of councils where they didn’t win the most votes and councillors elected on tiny vote shares. First Past the Post simply cannot cope with this new reality of multi-party politics.

As can be seen below, we have hit another milestone in terms of electoral fragmentation, with no fewer than five parties separated by just 14.2 percentage points in our April polling averages data – a new record.

Scroll down to see the polling for April 2026

First Past The Post is designed for a two-party environment. When people express their political preferences in a wider variety of ways the system starts to splutter and breakdown, producing increasingly chaotic outcomes that do not properly reflect how people have voted. We will be watching closely as the English local elections results come in and will report back on what happens.

Two sets of numbers to keep an eye on in the aftermath of the English local elections are the Projected National Share (PNS) produced by Professor Sir John Curtice, for the BBC and the National Equivalent Vote (NEV) produced by Professors Rallings and Thrasher, for Sky News.

Both the PNS and the NEV have been published every year for around the last 45 years. What these data attempt to do, via slightly different methodologies, is to estimate the vote share each party might have got if local elections had taken place across the whole country, rather than just in certain parts of it. This makes it possible to compare local elections vote shares from one year to the next, even though the types of places where English local elections take place varies significantly from one year to the next.

In May 2025, the PNS recorded five parties on over 10% of the vote for the first time and placed those five parties within 19 percentage points of each other. This year we expect to see both the PNS and NEV reflect an even more fragmented political landscape, in line with how the opinion polls have moved over the last year.

April UK General Election Polling Averages

The average (mean) vote shares from the most recent April poll by each of the ten polling companies who published a UK general election poll during April, is as follows:

* Compared with March’s average – Each month a different combination of pollsters will publish polls, so this change is not strictly comparing like with like, but gives a general sense of change

What do these mean?

• The party with the highest vote share has the support of only just over a quarter of voters.
• There is only a 14.2-point gap between the 1st and 5th placed parties, the smallest we have seen since we started collecting this data.
• The combined Conservative and Labour vote share is just 37.7%, a significant drop on the combined 57.4% they achieved at the 2024 general election, itself a record low.
• Reform UK’s vote share (26.4%) represents its lowest monthly average vote share in the last 12 months, since they recorded 24.9% in April 2025. They are down 5.4 points from their monthly average vote share peak, which was 31.8% in September 2025.

April’s polling average was compiled using data from the following pollsters – BMG; Find Out Now; Freshwater Strategy; Good Growth Foundation; Ipsos; J.L. Partners; More In Common; Opinium; Techne; YouGov.

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With growing fragmentation, it becomes harder and harder to work out how polling will translate into seats in Westminster, at UK general elections. Something that pollsters have tried to get round with MRP polls. These MRP polls take data from a bigger than normal sample of people. For example, the sample for YouGov’s most recent UK general election MRP was 13,000. YouGov’s MRP model  looks for relationships between people’s characteristics and how they intend to vote. It then combines these relationships with information about the characteristics of people living in different constituencies, in order to produce estimates of voting intention in each constituency.

Both YouGov and More In Common have published MRP polls for this week’s London local elections. However, both companies have stuck to estimating vote shares for each party, in each London borough, rather than attempting to estimate the number of council seats each party will get in each borough. This highlights just how difficult it is becoming to understand how party vote shares will translate into representation in elected chambers, under FPTP.

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On 7th May 2026, voters across Wales will elect not just a new Senedd, but a fundamentally different one. This is due to the practical level of how the election will work in Wales, where we will see an entirely new set of arrangements in place for the very first time.

The changes to the Senedd

When the Senedd was established in 1999, it was with 60 Members (MSs) elected via a combination of 40 First Past the Post seats and 20 regional Closed Party List Proportional Representation seats.

Following changes in the previous Senedd it will be 96 Members taking their seats in May, bringing the Senedd into line with the Scottish Parliament at 129 MSPs and the Northern Ireland Assembly at 90 MLAs, especially given Northern Ireland has a smaller population than Wales.

Alongside this increase, Welsh voters will use a new electoral system. All 96 MSs will be elected via a Closed List system, where parties will field a list of candidates in each constituency. Voters will be able to cast a vote for a party or an independent candidate, but not an individual on a party’s list. So, if your favourite candidate is stuck at fourth on their party’s list, you have no way of moving them up.

To facilitate these changes, 16 new constituencies have been created, which mirror the 32 Westminster constituencies, with six MSs returned in each. On top of this, elections are moving from a five-year to a 4-year term, and the limit on the number of government ministers allowed is increasing from 12 to 17, which could increase further to 18 or 19, subject to the Senedd’s approval.

How have we got here, and why?

It has been a long road to get here. The need to increase the number of MSs has been discussed since the early days of devolution. An Expert Panel, chaired by Professor Laura McAllister, was established in 2017, which recommended an increase in the size of the Senedd, and was followed by a number of Senedd committees which concurred with the panel’s recommendations. After the 2021 election, we saw the outline of a deal between Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru that led to a formal agreement on the details.

Finally, in 2024, the Senedd Cymru (Members and Elections) Act received Royal Assent, and the changes that followed are now in effect for the first time.

The Senedd has long needed an increase in its capacity. It is not acceptable for a national parliament with law making and tax raising powers to be smaller than many local authorities. Ten of Wales’ 22 local authorities are either the same size or larger than the Senedd was at 60 members.

That’s not to say that these reforms were easy. There will always be a difficulty in making the case for more politicians, and some political parties were opposed to the changes.

However, let’s take the case of committees in the Senedd. In practice, having 60 MSs has actually meant a lot fewer than that are able to sit on committees, as government ministers, party leaders of official groups in the Senedd, and the Presiding Officer do not sit on committees. The reality of the Senedd until now has been one of Members sitting on multiple committees, of sub-committees of just a couple of MSs scrutinising vital legislation.

This has not been good enough.

Imagine you were a Member of the Senedd with two committee meetings that week, with hundreds of pages of notes and evidence submitted by external organisations for each of these meetings. That’s not including the two pieces of legislation and hundreds of amendments you need to look at ahead of crucial votes in plenary, a debate you need to prepare for and a budget vote. Compare this with Westminster, where MPs will typically be on only one committee, although lots aren’t on any. This allows MPs to develop expertise in a particular area and be really across their brief. Increasing the size of the Senedd to 96 while not substantially increasing the number of committees should allow for MSs to have to sit on far fewer committees and develop the expertise on their issue that will lead to better scrutiny of both crucial legislation and substantial budgets. Our parliament needs to be sufficiently resourced to properly scrutinise a Welsh government budget of over £27 billion.

The increase to 96 members will hopefully lead to a much more effective parliament and scrutiny function.

The problem with the electoral system

Because of the increase to 96 Members the previous electoral system was found to be not workable (sufficient), and a new system has been put in place – the aforementioned Closed List system. This is despite it being ruled out by the Expert Panel on Assembly Electoral Reform and despite it being hugely flawed.

Voters will head to the polls on May 7th this year and find themselves unable to vote for their preferred candidate. This means voters will have to endorse a party’s list of candidates. The people who represent us in our national parliament will ultimately be chosen, in some cases, by party members and, in some, by party HQs in London or Cardiff.

An effective voting system needs to do a number of things, including being proportional, which in plain language means that the Senedd looks the way the Welsh people voted and the seats parties get match the votes they won. However, a good electoral system also needs strong accountability between voters and the politicians who represent them. The Closed List system, whilst good on proportionality, falls down on the voter link and accountability.

There is a chance to change this system in the next Senedd. A review mechanism was built into the legislation reforming the Senedd, and pretty soon after May, Members may well find themselves voting on whether to establish this review. Whether this will happen will depend on the makeup of the next Senedd. Some political parties have pledged to enact this review in their manifestos, while others have not.

If this system is reviewed, there is an obvious alternative to replace it – recommended for the Senedd by the Expert Panel and a Senedd committee – the Single Transferable Vote (STV).

STV is a system that is tried and tested in the UK and has been working well in Scotland (for local elections), Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland for decades. This is a system of proportional representation, where voters number the candidates on their ballot paper. Their favourite candidate is marked as number one, their second favourite number two, and so on. Voters can put numbers next to as many or as few candidates as they like. This system ensures proportionality and gives voters much more choice. For example, if your favourite candidate has no chance of being elected, your preferences will tell the people counting the votes to move your vote to your second preference candidate.

When voters in Wales head to the polls on 7 May, they will be electing a very different Senedd. Change may well be the buzzword for this election, but it feels unlikely that there won’t also be a call for further change, especially when it comes to the arrangements for future elections. At a time when trust in politics is at an all-time low, we need to ensure that the Senedd, and all parliaments in the UK, not only properly reflect how people voted but also maintain a strong link and accountability between voters and elected politicians.

This article was initially published by UCL

On 29 April 2026, the English Devolution & Community Empowerment Bill received Royal Assent. This means that it has passed all stages of its parliamentary progress, through the House of Commons and House of Lords and has become law, as the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act.

The Act covers a wide range of policy areas, but we’ve been paying particularly close attention to what it means for democracy and elections.

Goodbye to First Past the Post for Mayors

The most welcome change from our point of view is the scrapping of First Past The Post (FPTP) for the election of mayors (of both the Local Authority and Strategic Authority variety).

When elected mayors were first introduced in the early 2000s, they were elected using the Supplementary Vote system. This meant voters could put down a second choice when voting for these positions – ensuring that mayors were not elected with the support of just a small portion of the local community.

The previous government imposed First-Past-the-Post on Mayoral elections via their Elections Act (2022), which we strongly opposed – arguing that it would allow for powerful mayors being elected with a mandate from fewer local people. We also pointed out that it would reduce choice for voters, potentially forcing them to use their one vote tactically to vote for a candidate who was not their first choice, with the aim of keeping out a candidate they really disliked.

Can First Past the Post hold up in our ever increasing multi-party era?

With the rise of multi-party politics in England, the issue of candidates being elected on very low vote shares under FPTP has become even more acute. Sure enough, in May 2025, two Strategic Authority Mayors were elected with the support of fewer than 30% of voters.

In Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, the Conservative candidate was elected mayor with the support of just 28.4% of voters. Meanwhile, in the West of England Mayoral contest (covering Bristol; South Gloucestershire; and Bath & North East Somerset local authority areas) the Labour candidate was elected with just a quarter (25%) of all votes.

Supplementary Vote is back – a step forward, but not the finish line

The legislation passed yesterday means that mayoral elections will revert to being conducted under the Supplementary Vote system. We welcome this as a big step in the right direction but also called for a system upgrade – to the Alternative Vote. This would have meant voters could have expressed as many preferences as they wished when casting their vote, rather than being restricted to a single back-up vote. It would have meant fewer wasted votes and mayors being elected with a mandate from a bigger portion of local people.

Unfortunately, despite amendments tabled by both MPs and peers, the government decided to stick with SV, rather than switch to AV. It is important to re-iterate though, that SV is far preferable to FPTP.

The change isn’t coming in this May

The legislation has come too late for the six local authority mayoral elections (Croydon; Hackney; Lewisham; Newham; Tower Hamlets; Watford) that will happen on Thursday 7 May 2026 and which will be the last to take place under FPTP. We will keep a close eye on these results for any mayors elected on low vote shares, like we saw in May 2025.

At the same time, we will also be closely monitoring the results of the English local council elections, also due to take place on 7 May. Around 5,000 councillors will be elected, across 136 local authorities, all under First-Past-The-Post. We fully expect that the FPTP roulette wheel will be in evidence again, producing highly disproportional and chaotic outcomes on individual councils. We will report back on the most wild examples, in the aftermath of the elections.

[UPDATE: The Government has said their intention is for the Supplementary Vote to be in use by 19 June 2026]

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Sometimes change arrives with fanfare. Sometimes it arrives quietly, after years of argument, delay and unfinished business.

This week, the final hereditary peers lost their automatic right to sit and vote in the House of Lords, bringing an end to one of the most indefensible features of the UK constitution. Around 92 hereditary peers had remained in the chamber since the partial reforms of 1999, when hundreds more were removed, but a temporary compromise left a rump in place. That temporary measure lasted more than a quarter of a century.

Yet another compromise was required to finally finish the job. 15 Conservative hereditary peers and some crossbenchers will be waltzing back into the chamber with newly printed Life Peer passes.

A seat in Parliament should not be inherited

No one should have a role in making our laws because of who their parents were. In a modern democracy, the right to sit in parliament should come from the public. It should not be passed down like a family heirloom.

Yet for decades, the House of Lords retained exactly that logic. Some people could sit in Parliament not because voters chose them, nor because they were independently selected, but because they inherited a title, and were ‘elected’ by aristocrats with the same political party membership. That system belonged to another age.

The Electoral Reform Society has long campaigned for this moment

The Electoral Reform Society has argued for years that hereditary legislators have no place in a democratic system.

We said it when reform stalled. We said it when governments kicked the issue into the long grass. And we said it when defenders of the status quo insisted that an outdated compromise was good enough.

They were wrong.

Ending hereditary peers’ political power is not radical. It removes a glaring symbol of privilege from the heart of Parliament.

This is progress, but not the finish line

We should celebrate this step. But we should also be honest about what it does and does not solve.

Removing hereditary peers does not make the House of Lords democratic. It remains an unelected chamber dominated by political appointments, dodgy donors and pals of past prime ministers. Prime ministers still wield huge influence over who gets a seat, and the public still get no direct say over who scrutinises legislation in their name. We’ve seen that brought to life in the Mandelson scandal. One indefensible route into the Lords has closed. Others remain deeply flawed.

What comes next for the House of Lords

Now the obvious question follows: if hereditary peers are gone, what should replace the system that remains?

The Electoral Reform Society’s answer has long been clear. We need a second chamber that is smaller, more representative, and democratically legitimate. That means moving away from patronage and towards a system where the public have a meaningful voice.

There are different ways to design that chamber. But all of them would be better than clinging to an appointments system swollen by political favour.

Back in 1999, the removal of most hereditary peers was presented as the first stage of wider reform. Instead, the country was left with a half-finished settlement for decades.

This week closes that chapter.

It is welcome progress, and those who campaigned for years to make it happen should feel vindicated. But if we stop here, we risk repeating the same mistake: treating one reform as if it were the final destination. The government have promised a second stage to their programme of reform in the House of Lords, they can’t abandon that pledge.

Now let us build a House of Lords worthy of a modern democracy.

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