23AUG

Greens take a seat Reform came second in

2 min read

19:09UTC

The Green Party gained Hooley, Merstham and Netherne from the Conservatives on 41.8%, with Reform UK second on 24.4%. Reform finished runner-up in four seats it did not win.

← Back to Reform loses three wards, wins Clacton Jump to analysis ↓

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Key takeaway

The Greens gained a Surrey seat, and Reform finished second in four it lost.

The Green Party gained Hooley, Merstham and Netherne on Reigate and Banstead in Surrey with 41.8%, ahead of Reform UK on 24.4% ¹. The seat came off the Conservatives, whose worst result of the night ran to three defences lost: two to Reform and this one to The Greens. That continues the mid-July pattern of other parties consolidating where the anti-Conservative or anti-Reform vote has somewhere to go .

Reform finished second in four of the seats it failed to take, which is not the shape of a party in retreat. At Great Dunmow North on Uttlesford in Essex the Conservatives gained on 50.5% against Reform's 27.9%. At Bro'r Llynnoedd on the Isle of Anglesey, Plaid Cymru held with 48.5% against 39.3%, and at Hengoed on Caerphilly Plaid held again with 49.9% against 36.4% ². Plaid, which leads the Welsh government, held both wards comfortably enough, with Reform the challenger in each.

Elsewhere in the same set of ten contests, the Liberal Democrats held Hedge End South on Eastleigh in Hampshire with 46.1% on a 2.7 point swing towards them, and an Independent took Rumworth in Bolton from Labour with 42.3% ³. Independents win these vacancies more often than national polling suggests, because a ward-scale contest rewards a known local name over a party label.

A runner-up finish leaves no councillor and no committee seat, so it registers nowhere in any tally of party strength. It does tell the parties where to spend money next May.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

In a first-past-the-post election, the candidate with the most votes wins even if most people voted for someone else. When four or five parties are competing seriously in the same ward, as is increasingly common in England, the winning share can be well under 50%. In Hooley, Merstham and Netherne, the Green Party won with 41.8% of the vote, and Reform UK came second with 24.4%, well ahead of the Conservatives who had held the seat. Which party finishes second varies enormously from ward to ward depending on very local factors, which is why the same set of ten by-elections produced a Green win here, an Independent win in Bolton, and Reform holding or gaining seats elsewhere.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Under first-past-the-post, a four or five-way split vote lets a party win a seat with well under half the votes cast, and the same split can put very different parties in second place from ward to ward depending on which challenger has the stronger local organisation.

In Reigate and Banstead the split ran Green first, Reform second, leaving the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats trailing, while the same ten-by-election set saw an Independent beat Labour in Bolton and the Liberal Democrats hold Eastleigh against different opponents entirely.

The result also reflects each party's uneven ground campaign investment: the Greens have concentrated activist resources in specific target wards since 2022 rather than spreading thinly across every seat, which produces exactly this pattern of scattered, locally-earned wins.

What could happen next?

Meaning
Reform's second-place finish in Reigate and Banstead shows the party's local support is broad enough to beat established parties even where it does not win the seat.
Consequence
A widening four and five-way split across English wards makes individual by-election results a less reliable guide to any single party's national trajectory.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: The Green Party's 2022 to 2023 council gains in Mid Suffolk and East Suffolk followed the same pattern, winning wards where an insurgent right-of-centre challenger placed second, built on hyper-local campaigning on planning and environmental issues rather than national swing.

Counter-parallel: The Green surge in Hackney and Lewisham in May 2026 came in dense urban wards with a very different electorate to suburban Surrey, so the party's ability to win in one type of seat does not automatically transfer to the other.

Consensus view: Reigate and Banstead reads as evidence that England's four and five-way local contests now produce genuinely unpredictable outcomes, because a 17.4-point Green margin over a second-placed Reform is too wide to explain by tactical voting alone.

Counter-view: Against that, the result may equally reflect years of community campaigning on specific local issues, planning applications and green space protection in Hooley, Merstham and Netherne, rather than any national swing away from Reform.

Key tension: Whether a Green win in a seat Reform contested seriously shows the party has a genuine local ceiling in southern England, or whether this single ward's result reflects hyper-local factors that will not repeat elsewhere.

Sources:Local democracy reporting

Mentions:Hackney →Lewisham →Hengoed →England →Suffolk →Essex →Hampshire →Green Party →Reform UK →Liberal Democrats →Plaid Cymru →Labour Party →

First Reported In

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

Local democracy reporting· 12 Aug 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

Caused by

Labour crumbles in two more wards

Continues the mid-July pattern of opposition parties consolidating against Reform and Labour incumbents in council by-elections.

Occurred 16 Jul 2026

Read story →

This Event

Greens take a seat Reform came second in

Reform's second places across four contests, from 24% to 39%, give it a base to defend in 2027 in wards no headline counts as a gain.

Different Perspectives

Ian Davidson, Acting Returning Officer for Clacton

Davidson's office printed a 90cm ballot paper for the record 34-candidate field, with nothing in electoral law capping candidate numbers or the £500 deposit each pays. He expects the paper's size to raise printing costs and slow the count into the early hours, a strain that follows from the major parties' boycott, not from turnout.

Scottish Labour members

Members now choose between Michael Marra and Joe Fagan after Monica Lennon fell one MP nomination short of the three-MP, three-MSP threshold, a bar set by MPs and union officials rather than the wider membership. Whoever wins takes office having faced only one rival on the members' ballot.

Labour Party

Labour gained Penistone East from Reform on 20 August but lost Harraby South to Reform the same night, a wash that undercuts any claim of momentum. The party can point to beating Reform in a genuinely fought contest, but not to a pattern running only in its favour.

Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats took two of Reform's May wards, Almondbury on 13 August and St Neots Eynesbury on 20 August, the latter on a 29.8-point rise in their own vote share. Both results let the party claim it is the beneficiary when voters turn against Reform, not Labour or the Conservatives.

Reform UK

Reform UK can point to winning Clacton unopposed by the other major parties and to taking Harraby South from Labour, a ward it had never previously contested. That gives the party two results to cite even as three previously held wards changed hands elsewhere in August.

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.