24JUL

Labour crumbles in two more wards

1 min read

12:51UTC

On the same night Reform lost Old Catton, the Conservatives gained Dereham Toftwood and the Greens gained Fletton and Woodston, both from Labour, with Reform holding second in each.

← Back to England's council map redrawn as five sue Jump to analysis ↓

PoliticsDeveloping

Key takeaway

Conservatives and Greens took two more seats from Labour, which lost ground in all three 16 July by-elections.

The Conservatives gained Dereham Toftwood on Breckland council from Labour on 16 July 2026, with Reform UK a strong new second on 36.9% and Labour's share down more than 35 points ¹. On the same night the Green Party gained Fletton and Woodston on Peterborough City Council, also from Labour, with Reform again holding second on 29.7% ².

The Fletton and Woodston seat fell vacant after a Labour councillor quit alleging "sustained bullying" over her push for closed-circuit television (CCTV) in taxis ³. Neither result unseated Reform; both unseated Labour, the same pattern visible in Reform's own loss at Old Catton the same evening.

Read across the three contests, Reform lost only where it was defending its own seat and grew where it attacked a Labour incumbent. Labour lost in all three. Burnham's party changed leaders this month to relieve exactly this pressure , and the first by-elections of his premiership deepened it instead.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Two more council by-elections on 16 July went badly for Labour. The Conservatives took Dereham Toftwood from Labour in Norfolk, and the Green Party took Fletton and Woodston from Labour in Peterborough. Reform UK came second in both. A council by-election fills one vacant seat; it does not change who governs nationally. But a run of losses like this in a single day suggests Labour's support has weakened at the local level too, beyond what the national opinion polls show.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

An unnamed Labour councillor's complaint of 'sustained bullying' in Peterborough points to local party organisation problems compounding the national polling slide, a structural weakness in activist bases Labour has not defended seriously since boundary changes, rather than a single cause.

Reform UK holding second place in both contests despite Labour's collapse shows the party's roughly 40 cumulative councillor losses nationally by early July have not yet cost it its position as the default opposition-to-Labour vote in these wards.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Consensus view: Professor Rob Ford of the University of Manchester has argued that repeated fourth and fifth-place finishes for Labour in wards it held only a few years ago reflect a genuine erosion of its core vote, because the same pattern is now visible across dozens of separate contests rather than one outlier result.

Counter-view: The Institute for Government has cautioned against reading too much into by-election vote shares on the low turnouts typical of these contests, arguing single-ward results reflect motivated opposition voters turning out rather than any broad shift in Labour's underlying support.

Key tension: Whether Labour's repeated low finishes signal a genuine collapse in its core vote, or the low-turnout dynamics that always favour whichever party is angriest at the government of the day.

Sources:Bin The Labour Party

Mentions:Green Party →Reform UK →Norfolk →Institute for Government →Labour Party →

First Reported In

Update #13 · England's council map redrawn as five sue

Bin The Labour Party· 24 Jul 2026

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Different Perspectives

Reform UK

Reform lost Old Catton, the Norfolk seat it won by 1,006 votes ten weeks earlier, to the Conservatives on 16 July, while holding second in both other 16 July by-elections it did not previously hold. The party's May intake already undershot MRP polling by 38%, evidence its local base is thinner than its seat count suggested.

MHCLG / Steve Reed

Reed confirmed 38 new unitaries for 14 counties on 16 July but held back West Sussex and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, saying further time was needed. The department locked in the areas it was confident defending and paused the two it was not.

Local Government Association / litigating councils

Harlow's judicial review, filed 22 July, makes it the fifth council suing over reorganisation, joining Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Portsmouth, with none yet granted a full hearing. New LGA chair Eamonn O'Brien's 7 July intervention now sits behind their case, arguing the timetable itself risks statutory services.

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.

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.