It's all change, but the challenges still remain

THE county council elections here in Lancashire normally pass without incident.

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Sometimes power shifts from the Tories to Labour, or back again, but in the main, it generally feels like nothing really changes.

How different the 2025 county council elections turned out to be.

County council elections which really shouldn’t have been held, given the pending reorganisation of local councils in Lancashire.

I'm sure there’s more than one member of the former Tory cabinet at LCC wishing they'd taken the prudential step as so many other county councils did - and asked for the elections to be deferred until new council structures were confirmed later this year.

Instead, Tories and Labour were handed arguably the most painful drubbing either party has experienced at the county council, as Reform, a party which didn’t even exist at the time of the last county council elections in 2021, ran riot.

The party, which at time of writing doesn’t even have a leader in Lancashire to run the county council (that should be decided on Saturday), now has 53 councillors out of 84 seats available.

The Tories have been reduced to eight, and Labour just five.