Day 3: Reform's 14 councils, 894 seats short

Welsh Labour finished with 9 Senedd seats on 7 May 2026, the smallest Welsh Labour group in any devolved chamber since 1910, after First Minister Eluned Morgan lost her Ceredigion Penfro seat with 6,495 votes, becoming the first sitting head of a UK government to lose their constituency in office.

Twenty-seven years of continuous Welsh Labour government ended in a single count, with the sitting head of a UK government becoming the first to lose her own constituency in office. The closed-list D'Hondt arithmetic that produced the result is the system Welsh Labour itself wrote and voted into law in the 2024 Senedd Reform package. Read full version ↓

Plaid Cymru won 43 of 96 Senedd seats on 7 May 2026, with leader Rhun ap Iorwerth confirming on 8 May that Plaid will form a minority government with the 2 Wales Green MSs providing confidence and supply, appointing Ken Skates interim Welsh Labour leader within 24 hours.

A combined Plaid-Green total of 45 seats sits four short of the 49-seat majority threshold, meaning every Senedd division will require vote-by-vote support from Welsh Labour's 9 or the sole Welsh Liberal Democrat. The first First Minister vote falls inside the 28-day window set by Senedd standing orders. Read full version ↓

The SNP won 58 of 129 Holyrood seats on 7 May 2026, seven below the 65-seat threshold John Swinney named as the trigger for a 2028 independence referendum, with Holyrood turnout at 53.0%, down 10.5 points on 2021.

Westminster had refused a Section 30 order at 65 seats and has the same answer at 58. The constitutional argument shifts from contested mandate to no mandate at all, structurally compressing independence-referendum demand for the parliamentary term. Read full version ↓

Reform UK entered the Scottish Parliament for the first time on 7 May 2026, winning 17 seats and tying with Scottish Labour on 17, with the Reform Scotland group led by Malcolm Offord, marking the first hard-right populist caucus in Holyrood since devolution began in 1999.

It is the first hard-right populist caucus to sit in Holyrood since devolution began in 1999, and the first Parliament since 1999 in which Conservative-tradition unionism is no longer the principal opposition force on the Scottish right. Read full version ↓

Zoë Garbett won the Hackney mayoralty and Liam Shrivastava won Lewisham from Labour on 7 May 2026, becoming the first Green elected mayors of any London borough; Hackney council moved from Labour 44/Greens 6 to Greens 38/Labour 6, and Waltham Forest moved from Labour 45/Greens 0 to Greens 31/Labour 12.

The Polanski-Deptford targeting strategy launched on 10 April delivered exactly the inner-London Labour citadel breakthrough it was designed for. The Greens now hold four English councils outright and 543 council seats nationally, and gain a council governance record to take into the 2028 cycle. Read full version ↓

Lorna Slater (Scottish Greens) defeated Angus Robertson (SNP) in Edinburgh Central on 12,680 votes to 7,702 on 7 May 2026, the Scottish Greens' second-ever Holyrood constituency seat and the second time the party has taken a seat from a senior SNP figure on the constituency vote.

Robertson is one of three SNP figures most often named as a Swinney succession candidate. His loss removes a senior face from the SNP's post-election landscape and translates The Greens' Polanski-Deptford targeted-constituency strategy north of the border for the first time. Read full version ↓

Reform-controlled Lancashire County Council withdrew from the UK refugee resettlement scheme on 9 May 2026, two days after switching to Reform UK control following the 7 May elections, the first concrete policy decision from a Reform-controlled authority and the first test of council-level revocation of national-scheme participation.

Lancashire is the first test of whether Home Office scheme participation can be revoked by a county council without primary-legislation override. The Home Office's response will signal what 14 newly Reform-controlled councils can revoke at no central-government cost. Read full version ↓

Reform UK won 41 of 49 Thurrock Council seats on 7 May 2026 while MHCLG commissioners remain in legal control of the council's £1.5bn Section 114 budget, creating an elected mandate without spending authority on the council's largest single budget line.

Reform's Thurrock leadership now holds an elected mandate without spending authority on the largest single line on the council's books. Whether commissioners formally challenge a Reform-led decision is the first direct test of the commissioner-mandate boundary in UK local government. Read full version ↓

Norfolk County Council produced a hung result on 7 May 2026, with Reform UK winning 40 of 84 seats, three short of a majority; Great Yarmouth First (Restore Britain affiliate) took 9 seats, with the Liberal Democrats on 13, Greens on 12, and Conservatives on 8, meaning no two-party combination including Reform reaches the 43-seat majority threshold.

PollCheck projected Reform control of Norfolk; the Restore Britain split denied it. Norfolk's bin collections, schools admissions and adult social care commissioning now require multi-party coalition negotiation on every full-council vote, with no other party signalling willingness to coalesce with Reform. Read full version ↓

Reform UK's councillor base tripled in twelve months from 678 elected in 2025 to 2,126 after 7 May 2026, but the party's prior attrition rate of 65 out of 677 2025 councillors quitting or being expelled within a year projects a 200-plus annual departure pipeline across the expanded estate.

Reform now scales the same chief-executive disputes and lawful-advice friction the LGA flagged at its 2025 cohort across an estate three times the size, with its strongest councils carrying the burden of departure replacement. Read full version ↓

Sunderland fell to Reform on 7 May 2026 with a Reform group of 58 of 75 seats and Labour cut from 49 to 5, ending 50 years of continuous Labour control; Wakefield delivered Reform 58 of 63 seats reducing Labour from 48 to 1, the most extreme single-council collapse of the night.

The most extreme single-council seat swings of the night both landed in Leave-voting metropolitan boroughs where PollCheck applied a council-specific override to its uniform-swing model. Council tax decisions, planning policy and adult social care commissioning across two cities of 700,000 people change hands immediately. Read full version ↓