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.
24JUL
Reform's councillor losses start to slow
1 min read
12:51UTC
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
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.