23AUG

Reform sheds 56 councillors since May

3 min read

19:09UTC

Mark Pack's 3 August count puts Reform UK's losses since the May locals at 56, up from roughly 40 a month earlier. Not one of them was removed by voters.

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

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Key takeaway

Reform has lost 56 councillors since May, and voters removed none of them.

Mark Pack, the elections analyst whose running tally of councillor movements is the standard reference for them, counted 56 Reform UK councillors lost since the May 2026 local elections as at 3 August ¹. The same count stood at roughly 40 on 2 July . Pack splits the figure two ways: 31 were elected in May 2026 or later, and 25 joined the party before May and left afterwards.

Pack's case rests on comparison, not on the raw number. "What's different about Reform is that the proportion of its councillors that the party is losing is so very unusually high compared to other parties that it's a story in itself," he wrote ². The rival explanation, that any landslide sweeps in untested people and sheds some of them, is precisely what a comparison against other parties at the same stage is built to test.

All 56 left by defection, suspension or resignation. No voter removed any of them. Restore Britain, the party to Reform's right that holds seven seats on Kent County Council after a bloc defection in February, took four ³, and the councils with several departures apiece include Wakefield, Sheffield, Thurrock, Worcestershire and County Durham. Group sizes govern committee places and scrutiny chairs, so attrition on this scale reallocates who runs a council's business without a single vote being cast.

The tally already lags events. One further councillor has left since Pack's 3 August cutoff, and one who went in June has since joined another party. Reform is governing while it loses people: in Havering, the first London borough it controls, leader Cllr Keith Prince, a London Assembly Member (AM), put a plan to Full Council on 22 July whose stated priorities are stabilising the council's position, setting a long-term roadmap and delivering visible improvements ⁴.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

When a council seat changes hands at an election, the winner keeps that seat until the next scheduled vote, even if they later quit their party, get suspended, or defect to a rival. There is no equivalent of a parliamentary by-election trigger for councillors in England. Mark Pack, a Liberal Democrat activist who runs the UK's best-known council by-election tracker, has compared how many of Reform UK's newly elected councillors have already left the party against how other parties behaved after similarly big local election wins. His finding: Reform is shedding members faster than the historical pattern, through resignation, suspension and defection rather than any change in how voters marked their ballots.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

England's local government has no recall mechanism for councillors. A defection, resignation or expulsion leaves the seat occupied by whoever holds it until the next scheduled election, typically years away, unlike a parliamentary by-election trigger. That structural gap means a party's internal discipline problems show up as durable seat losses rather than being tested by voters.

Reform UK's 2025 candidate list was built at speed to contest thousands of wards simultaneously, with local vetting largely delegated to regional organisers rather than run centrally. Mark Pack's tracking shows the pattern recurring across unrelated wards, from Norfolk to Plymouth, which points to a systemic selection gap rather than isolated local disputes.

What could happen next?

Meaning
The churn measures Reform UK's candidate vetting and internal discipline, not its electoral appeal, because the seats are not being lost to voters.
Immediate · Assessed
Consequence
Councils where Reform loses its majority group cohesion may see budget and planning votes swing on individual defectors rather than party lines.
Short term · Reported
Precedent
If the churn rate continues at UKIP's post-2013 pace, a meaningful share of Reform's 677 councillors could sit as independents or under other parties before the next scheduled elections.
Medium term · Reported

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: UKIP's 2013 local elections delivered around 140 council seats on an insurgent surge; within two years roughly a third of that intake had defected, been suspended or quit, the same mechanism now visible in Reform's numbers, because English local government has no recall process and a seat won on one party's ticket stays occupied regardless of later defection.

Counter-parallel: The Liberal Democrats' 2010 coalition-era losses ran the opposite way: councillors quit over national policy anger, not local disciplinary failure, so the comparison only holds where the churn is disciplinary rather than ideological.

Consensus view: A 56-councillor loss inside a year reads as a governing-capacity problem rather than a polling one: a party that wins seats faster than it can vet or discipline candidates loses control of its own group discipline once those members hold office.

Counter-view: Against that, any party winning 677 seats from a standing start will see higher churn than an established machine with decades of candidate-vetting infrastructure, so defection rates arguably need to be measured against seat gains, not against parties that were not building from zero.

Key tension: Whether the churn reflects a structural vetting failure specific to Reform's rapid 2025 expansion, or a mechanical artefact of any party's first year holding hundreds of seats it has never held before.

Sources:Mark Pack

Mentions:Reform UK →Mark Pack →Restore Britain →Wakefield →Liberal Democrats →England →UKIP →Kent County Council →London →Thurrock Council →Keith Prince →Havering →

First Reported In

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

Mark Pack· 12 Aug 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Reform's councillor losses start to slow

The 3 August count of 56 continues the departure trend recorded at roughly 40 on 2 July.

Occurred 2 Jul 2026

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Carol Ney quits Reform over a post

Ney's resignation is one of the departures inside Pack's 56-councillor count.

Occurred 7 Aug 2026

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Carr takes his Reform seat to the SDP

Carr is already inside Pack's count of 56 departures.

Occurred 6 Aug 2026

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This Event

Reform sheds 56 councillors since May

Reform UK's council base is shrinking through defection, suspension and resignation rather than at the ballot box, and the rate is what makes it a story.

Led to

Durham councillor joins UK Social Democratic Party

McGlenen's move extends the councillor-departure tally Pack had put at 56 since May.

Occurred 20 Aug 2026

Read story →

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.