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.
12AUG
Reform's councillor losses start to slow
1 min read
14:07UTC
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.
Led to
Reform loses Old Catton to the Tories
Reform's roughly 40 cumulative departures by early July presaged the Old Catton defeat.
Occurred 16 Jul 2026
Read story →Reform sheds 56 councillors since May
The 3 August count of 56 continues the departure trend recorded at roughly 40 on 2 July.
Occurred 3 Aug 2026
Read story →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.