Reform Is Losing Councillors Elected In May At An "Unusual" Rate
Reform swept to victory in May, but it has not been plain sailing for the party since then (Alamy)
7 min read
Reform UK has lost more than 5 per cent of the councillors it had elected six months ago, an analysis by PoliticsHome has found.
Half a year has passed since Nigel Farage's party swept to victory in council elections across the country, winning almost 700 seats across 23 councils in a bruising electoral warning for both Labour and the Conservatives. After the dust settled on 1 May, Reform emerged in charge of 12 councils nationwide.
Since then, however, council life has not been smooth sailing for Reform.
Despite pledging to deliver major savings, its council leaders have been forced to confront the harsh realities of local government finances — with most now admitting that council tax rises may be unavoidable next year. PoliticsHome analysis in June found that councils won by Reform in May were spending up to 78 per cent of their budgets on social care and homelessness. The Institute for Government think tank said it showed that it would be "very difficult for Reform councillors to find excessive waste in local authority spending".
Farage's party has also had to deal with what local government expert, Professor Tony Travers, described as an “unusual and rapidly growing” loss of councillors.
PoliticsHome analysis of councils where full elections took place in May found numerous suspensions and expulsions from the party. Many councillors have left Reform to serve as independents, or have stepped down from the role altogether.
Reform has lost 36 councillors at the time of writing. Since May, when it won a total of 677 councillors, 11 have been expelled, six suspended, nine have left the party, one has defected to UKIP, and nine have resigned from the council altogether.
Not included in the main analysis are resignations or removals of councillors from senior cabinet positions who are still sitting as Reform councillors.
Travers, director of LSE London, told PoliticsHome that the figure was "an unusual number and rapidly growing, and so soon after Reform did so well in May this year".
"It's slightly reflective, though the numbers are bigger, of what has happened at Westminster, where Reform has had five, four and six MPs variously over the months since July 2024," he told PoliticsHome.
Rupert Lowe, who was elected for Reform at last year's general election, now sits as an independent MP for Great Yarmouth after having the party whip suspended in March 2025 following allegations of workplace bullying and threats against Reform's head of policy, Zia Yusuf, which he denies.
James McMurdock MP gave up the Reform whip earlier this year amid allegations over his use of government loans during Covid, revealed by the Sunday Times.
"What is at the root of it, particularly at the local level, is that Reform doesn't have the experience of vetting people who come forward to stand in elections at any level," Travers continued.
He added that the other older and more established parties have "learned the hard way" in previous years to have a clear sense of people's backgrounds.
Travers put the high number of Reform councillor losses to a combination of factors, including: having to put a large number of candidates up for election, a less established vetting process, and the unexpected challenges of being a councillor.
Farage has previously claimed that the party possesses "a vetting system that was as good if not better than the other parties".
This week alone, five Reform councillors were expelled from the party in Kent, while three Reform councillors in Cornwall left to form a new independent group.
The Kent departures came after a video of a tense council meeting was leaked to The Guardian.
In Kent, where the public elected 57 Reform councillors in May, leaving the party in charge, a total of eight councillors have since been lost —14 per cent of the original figure.
Reform suspended Kent councillor Daniel Taylor in June after he was arrested on several charges, including threatening to kill his wife. Taylor denies the charges. Meanwhile, Amelia Randall defected from Reform to Farage's former party, UKIP, in September.
In Cornwall, five of the 28 councillors elected in May have now left the party, forming a new Cornish Independent Non-Aligned Group.
Rob Parsonage, the former leader of the Reform group on the council, told the BBC that he had experienced a "friction” between the national party's priorities and the best interests of Cornish residents.
In Doncaster, Mark Broadhurst was cast out over historic social media posts deemed "unacceptable" by party leaders.
Reform has also lost councillors for other reasons, such as personal issues or ill health.
In Worcestershire, Gaynor Jean-Louis resigned from the council for health reasons in September, with the Liberal Democrats winning the resulting by-election earlier this week.
Linden Kemkaran, the leader of Kent County Council has lost eight of her Reform councillors since May (Alamy)
Despite the high number of losses for Reform, both at a local and Westminster level, the party continues to enjoy large leads in the opinion polls, with the latest YouGov voting intention survey putting Farage's party 10 per cent ahead of both Labour and the Tories.
A Reform spokesperson told PoliticsHome: “Every party experiences churn in local government. This is normal when you are dealing with a large number of councillors. Just recently, Labour lost nine councillors in Nottingham and Birmingham city councils, and the Conservatives lost nine in Sevenoaks council alone.
“Importantly, we are head and shoulders above every other party in British politics when it comes to gaining councillors. Compared to Labour and the Conservatives losing a combined 315 councillors since 1 May, Reform UK has gained 112, winning 43 seats from local by-elections.”
Analysis by PoliticsHome found that in seven of the by-elections held since Reform councillors stood down from their council position since May, more than half of those seats have been retained by the party.
Stuart Hoddinott, associate director at the Institute for Government, said the analysis "certainly raises questions about the quality of Reform’s vetting process".
“It can be difficult for parties to find sufficient councillors to stand across the country, meaning there will always be some that slip through the vetting net," he told PoliticsHome.
"Reform has lost a fair number of councillors in the six months since the local elections, often for quite shocking reasons."
However, Hoddinott said that "without comparable data for other parties, it is hard to know if Reform has lost them at an unusual rate".
He added: "With roughly 3,200 council seats up for re-election and more in newly formed councils in England in 2026, that vetting process is set to be tested even more extensively.”
PoliticsHome also carried out a separate analysis to test whether Reform had lost councillors at a faster rate than other parties, focusing on the 23 councils that had elections in May.
It confirmed that the number of Reform councillors had shrunk by almost 4 per cent, falling from 677 to 651 as of the end of October. In comparison, Labour – the only other one of the main parties to shed councillors – lost 2 per cent.
The number for Reform is slightly lower than the 5 per cent mentioned earlier in this piece, as Reform has won several of the by-elections in those councils.
A Labour spokesperson told PoliticsHome: “Reform councils are beset with chaos and local residents are paying the price.
“Nigel Farage and his councillors made big claims about the money they would save, found they were wrong and are now cutting services and plotting council tax rises.
"Local government was supposed to be the blueprint for what Reform would do nationally. What we're seeing instead is division, grievance and broken promises."
