Reform UK's cumulative councillor departures reached roughly 40 by 2 July on the tracker kept by Liberal Democrat peer and elections analyst Mark Pack 1. The pace has slowed sharply from the 22 lost in the fortnight after May's elections . The figure counts resignations, defections and expulsions since the May local elections, and the deceleration matters because a party that tripled its councillor base needs to hold those seats to run the councils it won. A separate tracker citing nearly 100 departures blends different cycles and is not comparable.
8JUL
Reform's councillor losses start to slow
1 min read
10:13UTC
Reform UK's cumulative councillor departures reached roughly 40 by early July on Mark Pack's tracker, a marked slowdown from the 22 lost in the fortnight after May's elections.
PoliticsDeveloping
Key takeaway
Reform's councillor losses have slowed to roughly 40 since May, easing fears of a structural collapse.
Deep Analysis
In plain English
Reform UK won a large number of council seats in England's May 2026 local elections. Since then, some of those councillors have quit, been suspended, defected to other parties, or resigned. Mark Pack, a Liberal Democrat peer who tracks these numbers, counted roughly 40 cumulative departures by 2 July. That is a much slower pace than the 22 lost in just the first fortnight after the election. This pattern, a fast wave of losses followed by a slowdown, also happened to UKIP after its own council surge a decade ago, as parties expanding quickly tend to lose their weakest recruits first.
Root Causes
Rapid attrition after a surge election typically front-loads onto candidates who were selected quickly and with limited vetting, the fastest and easiest departures to identify and remove or who resign first.
Once that initial cohort has left, the remaining councillors are disproportionately those who survived early scrutiny, which is the structural reason the departure rate slows over time even if underlying discipline problems persist.
Sources:Mark Pack
First Reported In
Update #11 · Farage to quit Clacton to force by-election
Mark Pack· 8 Jul 2026
Read original →Causes and effects
This Event
Reform's councillor losses start to slow
The bleed of Reform councillors is easing, suggesting the post-election churn was a spike rather than a structural collapse of its local base.
Different Perspectives
Local Government Association
New chair Eamonn O'Brien broke the LGA's neutrality on reorganisation for the first time since December 2024, telling the incoming prime minister the 'unprecedented scale' of disaggregation risks statutory services and asking him to adjust the LGR timetable, aligning the sector's institutional voice with the judicial review claims Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk have already filed.
Reform UK
Reform's £12m Harborne windfall from 2025 predates the 25 March retrospective crypto-donation ban, so the new law does not reach it; a live police probe into £500,000 of Cottrell donations continues, while the standards inquiry into Harborne's undeclared £5m gift is frozen since Farage vacated Clacton on 8 July.
Incoming Burnham government
Burnham secured 349 of the backing the NEC's 81-MP threshold required by 13 July, becoming Labour leader on 17 July and prime minister on 20 July without a members' ballot. He now inherits the LGR timetable the LGA wants him to adjust and a finance bill his own backbencher, Liam Byrne, is trying to harden further via amendment NC34.
Rupert Lowe / Restore Britain
Lowe called Farage's Clacton contest a 'Reform-sponsored media circus' and kept Restore Britain out of it, pledging instead to stand in the second by-election he expects the Harborne inquiry to force later this year. The boycott doubles as a signal that Restore Britain, not Reform, will contest the 'real' vote.
Kemi Badenoch / Conservative Party
Badenoch dismissed Farage's Clacton contest as a 'fake by-election' and joined the boycott, but reserved the right to fight a genuine second contest if Greenberg's inquiry forces one. The Conservatives are betting their real fight comes in autumn, not July.
Rhun ap Iorwerth / Plaid Cymru
Ap Iorwerth defended a £145m NHS allocation at First Minister's Questions on 1 July, blaming a graduate-nurse shortfall on 2022 training decisions taken before his Plaid-led government took office in May. Answering for choices his government did not make gives his new administration its first real accountability test.