Kent County Council

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 local elections when Reform won 57 of 81 seats at a single election, the largest council landslide for any insurgent party in modern British local government history. The win gave Reform a clear working majority and turned Kent into a live test of whether the party could manage a large public authority.

By April 2026, before any further local elections, Reform's Kent group had shrunk from 57 to 47 seats through a combination of resignations, defections, expulsions and the seat lost at the Cliftonville by-election on 9 April 2026, the first ballot-box defeat. Ten councillors had departed in under a year, a figure that mirrors the national attrition pattern: HuffPost UK reported 65 of 677 Reform councillors elected in 2025 had left within a year. The Cliftonville result, where Green candidate Rob Yates defeated Reform's Marc Rattigan, was the first time a Reform-held seat was taken in a by-election.

Kent County Council is among the local authorities subject to the MHCLG Local Government Reorganisation programme. Essex, not Kent, was named in the 25 March 2026 LGR announcement, but the structural pressures facing large county councils are common across the region.