Kent County Council
Reform UK's 2025 flagship at 57 of 81 seats, since reduced to 47 by departures.
Reform UK's Kent County Council group has fallen from 57 seats to 47 since its May 2025 landslide win, the loss of the 9 April 2026 Cliftonville by-election marking the council's first ballot-box defeat.
Last refreshed: 23 August 2026 · Appears in 2 active topics
With ten councillors gone before a single new vote, is Reform's Kent majority already structurally fragile?
Timeline for Kent County Council
Mentioned in: Reform sheds 56 councillors since May
UK Local Elections 2026Issued pre-action protocol letter to Communities Secretary on 1 June 2026
UK Local Elections 2026: A fourth county sues over its abolitionConfirmed pre-action letter citing similar JR grounds
UK Local Elections 2026: Essex sues to stop its own abolitionReform-controlled council watching Lancashire precedent
UK Local Elections 2026: Mentioned in: Lancashire is first to quit UKRSMentioned in: Norfolk hung: Reform 40 of 84 seats
UK Local Elections 2026Background
Kent County Council is the county council for Kent in southeast England, one of the largest county councils in the UK. It became Reform UK's flagship local government gain in the May 2025 elections, when the party won 57 of 81 seats in the largest council landslide for any insurgent party in modern British local government history, giving Reform a clear working majority and turning Kent into the primary live test of whether it could manage a large public authority.
The council has since become a reference case for the difficulty of translating a rapid insurgent win into stable administration, its Reform group thinning through resignations, defections and expulsions well before any further elections were due. Kent County Council is not among the authorities named in the 25 March 2026 government Local Government Reorganisation announcement, but structural pressures on large county councils, including legal challenges mounted elsewhere, are watched closely across the southeast.
Kent's Reform majority keeps shrinking
Reform UK's group on Kent County Council has fallen from the 57 of 81 seats it won in the May 2025 landslide to 47 by April 2026, shedding roughly one councillor every five weeks to resignation, defection and expulsion, a 17% attrition rate in under a year.
Kent's first ballot-box loss came at the 9 April Cliftonville by-election, where the Green Party's Rob Yates beat Reform's Marc Rattigan by a 26.7-point swing after the previous Reform councillor, Daniel Taylor, was jailed for coercive behaviour, the vacancy rather than a swing against Reform's record triggering the contest. The pattern has continued nationally since: by early August Reform had lost 56 of the councillors it won across England in May 2026, an attrition rate Mark Pack called unusually high for a party this soon after a landslide.