12AUG

Reform wins three of ten by-elections

2 min read

14:07UTC

Reform UK took Snettisham, Heacham and Long Sutton from other parties and held Harton, across ten council by-elections on 30 July and 6 August.

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Key takeaway

Reform took three seats from other parties and held a fourth in a fortnight of by-elections.

Reform UK gained three council seats and held a fourth across ten council by-elections held on Thursday 30 July and Thursday 6 August ¹. On 6 August it took Snettisham on 35.1% and Heacham on 37.8%, both from the Conservatives on King's Lynn and West Norfolk in Norfolk, with the Liberal Democrats runner-up in each. It held Harton on South Tyneside with 35.3%. Its 30 July gain was Long Sutton on South Holland in Lincolnshire, taken from an Independent on 56.3%.

Council by-elections fill single vacancies between the four-yearly whole-council rounds, usually on turnouts under a third, and in midsummer lower still. They measure a party's standing with the voters who still turn up, which is a different quantity from its ability to keep hold of the people it selected. Reform's two figures currently point in opposite directions, and only one of them involves anybody voting.

Three weeks earlier the traffic ran the other way. The Conservatives took Old Catton back from Reform in Norfolk . On the same mid-July Thursday the Conservatives and Greens took two further seats off Labour . Two Thursdays of results in either direction is a small sample, and the honest reading of these ten contests is that opposition parties consolidate where they can and Reform converts where the Conservative vote has already gone.

The gains matter most for what they set up. A ward won on a summer by-election is a ward Reform defends in the May 2027 unitary elections with an incumbent in place, on boundaries that reorganisation may yet redraw.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

A council by-election happens when a councillor resigns, dies, or is removed, and the seat is refilled by a vote in that single ward rather than waiting for the next scheduled election. Ten such contests were held on 30 July and 6 August across different councils. Reform UK won three of them from the Conservatives and an Independent, and held onto a fourth it already had. Because each of these votes only involves the few thousand voters in one small area, and because turnout in by-elections is usually much lower than in a full council election, the results tell you about that specific ward more reliably than they tell you about the country as a whole.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

By-election turnout typically runs at a fraction of a full council election, often below 30% of the electorate, which means a few hundred committed activists can decide the outcome regardless of the wider national picture. Reform's ground campaign in Norfolk, built on the party's existing county council administration there, gave it a local organisational advantage in Snettisham and Heacham that a national poll cannot capture.

The seats being contested were themselves vacated by resignations and deaths rather than a coordinated recall, so the ten results are a patchwork of unrelated local triggers rather than a single test of Reform's standing.

What could happen next?

Consequence
Reform's hold at Harton, South Tyneside shows the gains are not limited to its existing Norfolk stronghold.
Meaning
A 30% win rate across ten scattered by-elections is broadly consistent with Reform's current national polling share rather than evidence of an accelerating trend.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: The Liberal Democrats built much of their 1990s and 2000s council strength through exactly this kind of steady by-election accretion, winning individual wards on local issues years before any national poll reflected the gains, showing that council by-election wins can be a genuine leading indicator rather than noise.

Counter-parallel: The Conservative Party's council by-election performance stayed resilient through 2021 and 2022 even as its national polling collapsed after the 2022 leadership turmoil, showing the two measures can diverge sharply when local campaigning capacity outlasts national reputation.

Consensus view: A 30% strike rate across ten contests reads as broadly in line with Reform's national polling share rather than a sign of momentum, because by-elections tend to track the incumbent-versus-challenger dynamic in each specific ward more than any national swing.

Counter-view: Against that, vote shares in the mid-to-high 30s in Snettisham and Heacham, plus the same-day hold at Harton in South Tyneside, point to support consolidating in more than one region rather than a single local pocket.

Key tension: Whether ten scattered by-elections, each fought on local turnout of a few hundred voters, support any conclusion about national trend at all.

Sources:Local democracy reporting

Mentions:Reform UK →Conservative Party →Liberal Democrats →Norfolk →Old Catton →Labour Party →

First Reported In

Update #15 · Reform bleeds councillors, wins by-elections

Local democracy reporting· 12 Aug 2026

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Different Perspectives

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd ruled out a Stormont walkout on 11 August despite calling the DUP increasingly difficult to work with, closing a question Conor Murphy had left open a fortnight earlier. Only Sinn Féin or the DUP can collapse the joint First Minister office, so the denial gives up the party's own leverage in budget talks.

Scottish Labour

Michael Marra, Joe Fagan and Monica Lennon declared for the Scottish Labour leadership, but each needs nine endorsements from MSPs, MPs and unions before members vote, with nominations closing 17 August. Lennon, the only woman standing, says the threshold favours a male-run process and could produce an all-male ballot.

Plaid Cymru

Plaid Cymru held both Welsh wards Reform challenged in the same set of by-elections, Bro'r Llynnoedd on Anglesey by 48.5% to 39.3% and Hengoed on Caerphilly by 49.9% to 36.4%. The party that leads the Welsh government kept Reform in second in both.

Conservative Party

The Conservatives lost three of ten council by-elections fought on 30 July and 6 August, two wards to Reform in Norfolk and one to the Greens in Surrey, continuing a run of losses since the May sweep. Every seat gone had been Conservative-held going into the contest.

Reform UK

Reform's 56 lost councillors since May came from defection, suspension and resignation, not lost votes, while the party gained three of ten council by-elections and finished second in four more over the same fortnight. That record undercuts reading the churn as electoral retreat.

Democratic Unionist Party

Gavin Robinson rejects Sinn Féin's characterisation of the institutions as precarious, says the DUP is "committed to" delivering for the public, and will not be "goaded" into a dispute he attributes to Treasury funding rather than unionist bad faith.