Counting was under way on Friday after votes in England, Scotland and Wales, and the first results in England began to come through with early wins for Reform UK. Philippa Nicholson won Brentwood's Hutton South ward with 987 votes, while the Conservatives finished on 785 votes.
Reform also took Chorley East, where Martin Topp secured 778 votes against Labour's 677. The result added to a night in which the first declarations were arriving quickly and the wider shape of the local election counts was starting to emerge.
Professor John Curtice said polling before the vote had pointed to a difficult night for Labour and the Conservatives, and the early returns did not alter that picture. He said Reform UK and the Greens were making significant gains, and warned that many of the winners would do so on relatively low shares of the vote. In one of the clearest signs of the fragmented contest, he said the new five-party politics meant the party gaining a seat was not always the one that had made the biggest advance since 2022.
The counting matters now because the results are the first hard test of voter mood since Labour won the general election almost two years ago and took the Harlow constituency in Essex. Scottish and Welsh parliament results were due from midday, adding another layer to a ballot that is already being read as a measure of how far the main parties have slipped, or held, since the last major national contest.
James Griggs, the Labour group leader in Harlow, said he expected to lose some really good councillors and some hard-working councillors on the night. He said there had been some mistakes since Labour took power and that the party had to keep repairing the damage left by 14 years in austerity. For him, the results were not just about one bad evening but about whether the party's delivery since the general election has been enough to keep voters on side.
That is the tension running through the count: Labour is being judged on whether it can absorb losses without calling them a verdict on the government, while Reform is turning early local wins into evidence that its vote is broadening beyond isolated pockets. The next round of declarations, especially from Scotland and Wales later in the day, will show whether those first results were a preview of the night or just the opening burst.
