22MAY

IfG counts 61 NOC councils, record

3 min read

10:09UTC

The Institute for Government counted 61 councils under No Overall Control after polling, the highest figure on record, and reframed the 7 May results as local dress rehearsals for the multi-party arithmetic Westminster may face at the next general election.

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Key takeaway

Sixty-one councils now sit under No Overall Control, with three of them also litigating their own abolition.

The Institute for Government counted 61 councils under No Overall Control after polling, the highest figure since records began ¹. The IfG reframed the 7 May results as "local dress rehearsals" for the multi-party Westminster arithmetic the next general election may produce, and recommended abolishing election-by-thirds in council elections to make partisan shifts more legible.

No Overall Control governance depends on negotiated coalitions or minority arrangements rather than majority control. Either route produces slower decision-making, higher service-delivery risk, and committee balances that can flip on a single suspension or defection. That is the structural read of the five-party fragmentation the pre-election MRP polls projected but could not convert into precise council-level forecasts. Three of the 61 NOC councils are simultaneously named in the LGR pre-action protocol letters, which means governance fragility and a live judicial review are now coexisting on the same balance sheet for Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk.

Under election-by-thirds, a third of councillors stand each year in metropolitan and some district councils, smoothing the appearance of partisan swing across three cycles. The IfG argues abolition would surface the full scale of partisan shifts in a single round, making the 7 May result more legible to Whitehall planners. The recommendation runs into the institutional inertia of councils that prefer the smoothing effect.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

After the 7 May elections, 61 councils in England have no single party with a majority of seats. That is a record number. In those councils, nothing can be approved unless parties agree with each other or a minority group convinces enough other councillors to abstain. Decisions that would normally pass quickly become prolonged negotiations. The Institute for Government, a research body that studies how government works, observed that these 61 councils may be a preview of what happens if the next UK general election also produces no majority in parliament. MPs would face the same bargaining dynamics that local councillors in Essex, Bristol, or Oxford are already navigating. The IfG also wants to change the rules for local elections so that all a council's seats are contested at once, rather than in thirds over three years, which would make it easier to see how voters' views have shifted.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The 61-council figure derives from the convergence of three electoral patterns simultaneously. First, the five-party fragmentation the pre-election MRP models projected materialised almost exactly: no single party could convert plurality vote shares into seat majorities at council level under first-past-the-post.

Second, Reform UK's 2,126-seat haul is distributed across wards rather than concentrated, which means many councils where Reform has significant vote share do not have Reform-majority control. Third, the Liberal Democrat advance in southern and south-western councils, combined with Green advances in university cities, produced NOC situations even where the Conservatives had previously held solid majorities.

The IfG's election-by-thirds recommendation addresses the measurement problem rather than the governance problem. Under the current system, one-third of councillors in most urban councils stand each year for three years, then there is a fallow year.

This spreads the 7 May swing across three future cycles, making the council balance sheet appear to stabilise when the underlying national partisan shift has been large. Abolishing election-by-thirds would surface the full shift in a single round, making the governance challenge more legible but no less difficult to manage.

What could happen next?

Consequence
Three of the 61 NOC councils are simultaneously facing LGR pre-action protocol letters, creating a situation where governance fragility and active litigation coexist on the same institutional balance sheet for Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk.
Short term · Reported
Risk
If 61 NOC councils produce 61 different local governance arrangements, Whitehall's planning and funding allocation machinery, which assumes known lead political authorities, will face coordination delays on housing targets, infrastructure bids, and LGR implementation.
Short term · Assessed
Opportunity
The IfG's election-by-thirds abolition recommendation now has empirical evidence from a 61-council NOC wave to support it, making the reform more politically viable than before the 7 May results.
Medium term · Assessed

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: The wave of NOC councils in England in the early 1990s, following the 1990 community charge protests and the Thatcher resignation, produced 40-50 councils in No Overall Control between 1991 and 1993.

Local Government Chronicle documented that governance instability in those councils averaged 14 months before a working majority emerged through by-elections or defections. The current 61-council figure is 20-25% higher than the 1990s peak, suggesting a more sustained period of negotiated local governance than Britain has experienced in the devolved era.

Counter-parallel: The 2017-2019 NOC councils that emerged after post-austerity Conservative losses in metropolitan areas (Bristol, Sheffield, Leicester) demonstrated that minority Labour administrations could govern stably for full four-year cycles where council officers maintained service continuity and political groups agreed informal service-protection compacts.

That post-austerity stability depended on all groups sharing an interest in avoiding blame for cuts. The 2026 cohort's NOC councils face a different incentive: LGR uncertainty and Reform's judicial reviews create strategic reasons for opposition groups to destabilise administration rather than protect it.

Consensus view: The Institute for Government's local government programme and the Local Government Association both identify No Overall Control as structurally distinct from formal coalition governance.

IfG's Dr Parry Mitchell notes that NOC councils produce three governance modes: formal written coalitions (rare), minority administration (most common), and rotating annual leadership arrangements (used in approximately 15% of NOC councils historically). The 61-council figure means no single party can project a national NOC governance template; each of the 61 councils will negotiate its own arrangement locally.

Counter-view: The Electoral Reform Society's Dr Jess Garland argues the IfG's 'dress rehearsal' framing overstates the comparability between council and parliamentary coalition mechanics. Councils operate under the Local Government Act 2000 cabinet model, where the cabinet can be a single-party minority and still govern on day-to-day decisions.

Westminster's parliamentary model requires a supply-and-confidence arrangement or a formal coalition for budget votes. The institutional constraints on minority governance differ structurally, making the 'rehearsal' frame analytically questionable.

Key tension: Whether IfG's election-by-thirds recommendation, if adopted, would clarify Westminster's multi-party arithmetic or simply surface swing volatility in a single cycle, creating the appearance of clarity while masking underlying fragmentation.

Sources:Institute for Government

Mentions:Suffolk →England →Essex →Local Government Association →Whitehall →Norfolk →Westminster →Institute for Government →Electoral Reform Society →

First Reported In

Update #9 · Three constitutional contests open

Institute for Government· 22 May 2026

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Different Perspectives

UK Government (Labour)

Westminster framed the youth justice transfer as a culmination of prior work rather than a precedent, refused a Section 30 order before the request arrived, and omitted both the Representation of the People Bill and any Wales Bill from the 13 May King's Speech. Starmer is described as open to a devolved-leaders summit in June.

Reform UK

Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk filed pre-action protocol letters framing their LGR challenge as mandate-consistent, while 22 Reform councillors departed in 14 days at an annualised rate nearly three times the 10 percent projection. Richard Tice defended the Harborne 5 million pound gift as unconditional, with no acknowledgement of Farage's two contradictory accounts on record.

SNP (Scottish Government)

Swinney submitted a Section 30 request on 14 May citing the 73-seat SNP-Greens pro-independence bloc and the 2014 Edinburgh Agreement precedent, despite the SNP finishing seven below his self-set 65-seat trigger. Downing Street's contradictory readout of their call suggests Westminster is treating the request as a holding item rather than a live constitutional negotiation.

Welsh Government (Plaid Cymru)

ap Iorwerth framed the youth justice transfer as a starting point for his six-power Wales Bill agenda, pressing demands at a phone call with Keir Starmer on 18 May and winning the first statutory function transfer to Cardiff since 1999. The Greens' unwritten confidence-and-supply arrangement gives him 45 of 96 seats, four short of a majority.

Russell Findlay (Scottish Conservatives)

Findlay refused to resign as Scottish Conservative leader after the party fell to 12 Holyrood seats and lost all five constituency MSPs. He declined Swinney's post-election talks invitation, the only major-party leader to do so.

John Swinney (SNP)

Swinney committed on 14 May to a Holyrood Section 30 vote within a week despite winning seven seats fewer than his own trigger threshold, relying on a SNP-Green majority of 73. He tabled a meeting with Starmer; Downing Street disputed that any referendum discussion was agreed.