Voting: a numbers game.

Reform gets 677 new councillors while Labour gets no votes in some wards. Alicja Hagopian crunches the election figures

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The dust has settled on this year's local elections, with Nigel Farage's Reform party seeing unprecedented success across the country.

Some 1,650 local councillors were elected in 23 councils, with a further six mayoral races and one by-election in Runcorn and Helsby.

From the unexpected scale of Reform’s success to Labour winning no votes in some areas, The Independent looks at the most important figures from the 2025 local elections.

Hundreds of seats for Reform

Reform entered the local elections this year with zero seats to defend and went on to win 677 council seats.

This easily exceeded expectations, with pollsters predicting around 400 to 450 seats for Mr Farage’s right-wing party.

Both Labour and the Conservatives, on the other hand, lost hundreds of seats, amounting to two-thirds of their 2021 representation on local councils, far worse for both parties than expected.

The Conservatives had the most to lose, winning some 996 seats in 2021, when these councils last held elections.

Labour barely scraped ahead of independent candidates and Greens, winning just shy of 100 seats.

The third-party players – Reform and Lib Dems – both ousted Labour and the Conservatives to be the two leading parties in the local elections.

Though their success was somewhat overshadowed by Reform UK, the Lib Dems nearly doubled their council seats from 2021, prompting experts to suggest the UK is moving away from a two-party system to a four- or five-party one.

Labour failed to get any votes in dozens of wards