Postponing local government elections

A debate is scheduled for Tuesday 2 March based on e-petition 747234, titled “Remove power to cancel local government elections”. This e-petition requested the government to:

"Change the law to remove the power of the Secretary of State to cancel any further forthcoming local government, metropolitan borough, London borough or any other elections, for example, but not limited to, those due in May 2026.

Ever since 1918, the right to vote is sacred and inalienable. 2025 Elections in some areas were cancelled this year. We believe any further cancellations would be voter suppression and undemocratic. The will of the people of the nation must be heard."

This petition began on 25 November 2025. The Petitions Committee took the decision on 27 January 2026 to hold a debate on the petition. The petition had reached 152,814 signatures as of 24 February 2026.

The Government responded to the petition on 5 January 2026. It said “the Secretary of State’s powers in this area are set out in legislation made by Parliament and used only with strong justification. The Government has no plans to amend these powers”. A fuller response can be found on the petition’s page on the Parliamentary website.

The background to the petition consists of a decision by the Government to postpone some local government elections from 2026 to 2027. This decision was subsequently reversed. Some local government elections had already been postponed from 2025 to 2026. The postponement decisions were occasioned by the Government’s plans to reorganise local government in two-tier areas in England.

More information on all of these issues is available in section 4 of the Library research briefing Local government reorganisation 2026

How are elections postponed?

The government can delay local elections using the powers in section 87 of the Local Government Act 2000. Section 87 says:

"(1) The Secretary of State may by order make provision which changes the years in which the ordinary elections of councillors of any specified local authority are to be held but which does not change the scheme which prevails (whether by virtue of an order under section 86 or otherwise) for the ordinary elections of those councillors.

(2) A local authority is specified if it is—

(a) a local authority (or one of the local authorities) specified by name in the order, or

(b) a local authority falling within any class or description of local authority specified in the order.

(3) An order may include provision to secure the retirement of existing councillors at times different from those at which they would otherwise retire."

The ‘scheme ... for the ordinary elections’ in effect means the election timetable. In other words, if an election was delayed for a year, the following election would not therefore also be delayed by a year: it would be held on the same day as originally scheduled.

Local authorities themselves cannot force the Government to postpone elections under certain circumstances, nor can they prevent the Government from using this power to postpone elections. Postponing a council’s elections does not make any difference to its legal status or its power to take decisions.

Section 87 also allows the government to extend the terms of sitting councillors in the event of a postponement. The normal practice is to extend them to the date of the first elections to the new authority.

A number of amendments were tabled to the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill in early 2026 seeking to repeal or amend the Secretary of State’s power to postpone local government elections.

Why did the Government propose to postpone elections?

The Government is reorganising all two-tier areas of local government in England into unitary authorities. This process is scheduled to be complete by April 2028.

When a new unitary authority is created in an area, the government may decide to postpone elections to its predecessor authorities. This may be done, for instance, when scheduled elections to the predecessor authorities are due to take place a year before a new unitary authority is due to come into existence. Proceeding with elections in that scenario would mean that councillors elected to the predecessor authority would only serve a single-year term.

Postponements in previous reorganisation processes

During previous reorganisation processes, elections have been postponed and the terms of office of sitting councillors in authorities that are to be abolished have been extended. When this has been done, the standard practice has been to postpone elections for a year, not for longer.

For instance, elections to Cumbria County Council, Carlisle City Council and South Lakeland District Council were postponed from 2021 to 2022, and sitting councillors’ terms of office were extended. These elections were then cancelled and elections to the new unitary authority of Westmorland and Furness and the new unitary authority of Cumberland were held in May 2022. Those authorities’ vesting day (when they took up their powers) was 1 April 2023. This meant that the sitting councillors from before the reorganisation served terms of almost six years (May 2017 to April 2023).

Equivalent timescales applied in other reorganisation processes, meaning that sitting councillors remained in office for almost six years in Northamptonshire (2015-21), Somerset (2017-23), and North Yorkshire (2017-23),

Elections scheduled for May 2026: postponement and reinstatement

In a written statement on 18 December 2025, the government indicated that it would consider offering local authorities facing reorganisation the opportunity to delay elections that were scheduled for May 2026:

We are therefore inviting councils today to set out their views on the postponement of local elections in their area and if they consider that postponement would release essential capacity to deliver local government reorganisation. We have asked for representations by no later than midnight on 15 January.

In December 2025, the government wrote to 64 local authorities inviting representations on whether their 2026 local elections should be postponed.

A further debate took place on 19 January 2026. Sir James Cleverly asked why the Electoral Commission had not been consulted on the cancelled elections, and whether the government accepted the Gould principle that “at least six months’ notice should be given for any changes to election administration”.

On 22 January 2026, the government announced that elections in 29 local authorities scheduled for May 2026 would be postponed. The list of postponed elections, and of authorities whose May 2026 elections were to go ahead, was provided in a written statement. A further postponement, in Pendle, was confirmed on 29 January. Regulations were laid before Parliament on 5 February.

Reinstatement of 2026 elections

On 16 February the Government then announced that the elections postponed in January would now go ahead. A letter from MHCLG said:

"The Secretary of State has decided to withdraw his decision to postpone the council elections of 30 local councils due to take place in May 2026 in the light of recent legal advice …

The Secretary State invited the housing minister, who was not involved in the initial decision-making, to reconsider the position afresh on a very urgent basis recognising the pressing timescales involved. The housing minister has decided that the elections should proceed in May 2026."

The decision was confirmed by a written statement on 23 February 2026.

The Electoral Commission, Electoral Reform Society, and Institute for Government welcomed the decision not to postpone the elections. Florence Eshalomi, chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, said:

"I welcome this development. As I argued previously, democracy is not an inefficiency that should be cut out during local government reorganisation process.

Councils should not have been put in the position of choosing between frontline services or elections. I welcome the indication that the Government will provide additional resources to ensure that local council elections can take place and look forward to seeing more detail on this."

Jonathan Carr-West, chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit, said:

"This most recent announcement means that 30 councils will now have to run elections within an even more constrained timetable. This risks the successful delivery of elections in all of these places, not to mention the additional strain it will needlessly add to the workloads of dedicated staff. On the political side, many parties will now be scrabbling around to find candidates they didn’t think they needed. It’s reckless of the government to play fast and loose with the foundations of democracy."

Criticisms of the abandoned 2026 postponements

A number of sources expressed disquiet at the original decision to postpone elections in 2026. The Times reported comments made by Shaun Roberts of the pressure group Unlock Democracy, who said that cancelling the elections “risks compounding the crisis of distrust in politics”:

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Labour is running scared of the voters. Cancelling elections is a serious step that should only ever be taken in the most exceptional circumstances. For ministers to do so now, when it seems to disproportionately benefit their own party, risks compounding the crisis of distrust in politics.”

Reform UK sought a judicial review of the decision to postpone the 2026 elections. The application for judicial review was scheduled for 19 February 2026. This was then overtaken by the Government’s decision to allow the elections to go ahead.

In a debate following the Secretary of State’s written statement on 22 January 2026, Robert Jenrick (Ref) challenged the decision to postpone elections for a second year:

"When I was the Secretary of State, the legal advice I received—including from Sir James Eadie, the Government’s chief legal adviser —was that it was not legally sustainable to delay for a second year, hence we did not. Even during covid, we kept the elections going and did not delay for two years. What the Secretary of State is doing is almost certainly illegal. If he is so confident of his position, will he publish his legal advice and publish the legal advice that I and the then Prime Minister received when we decided not to delay for a second year?"

The Chief Executive of the Electoral Commission, Vijay Rangarajan, said “Scheduled elections should as a rule go ahead as planned”:

"We are disappointed by both the timing and substance of the statement. Scheduled elections should as a rule go ahead as planned, and only be postponed in exceptional circumstances. We are concerned by the possibility of some council elections in May being postponed, and even more by any further postponement to those which already had been deferred from 2025."

The Electoral Reform Society said “It is time for the rules around the postponement of local elections in England to be examined”:

"It is concerning that elections could be seen as something that detracts from councils’ roles, rather than the vital mandate local politicians need to make decisions for the residents they serve.

It is also concerning that the decision to seek postponement or not has been left to individual councils, creating a clear conflict of interest.

It is time for the rules around the postponement of local elections in England to be examined and the situations in which they can be postponed defined much more clearly. It is also time to question whether such postponements should be allowed to happen solely at the stroke of the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government’s pen."

Which elections were postponed in May 2025?

The government had previously postponed some elections from May 2025 to May 2026 because of the reorganisation.

In a letter in December 2024, the government said that councils hoping to bid for unitary reorganisation could request that the government postpone local elections that were scheduled for May 2025. The government said that it would agree to postpone elections that were scheduled for May 2025 in Devolution Priority Programme areas, and in areas that “need reorganisation to unlock devolution”.

Sixteen county councils and two unitary authorities notified the government that they would like to postpone their May 2025 elections. The government agreed to postpone elections in:

• Surrey
• Norfolk
• Suffolk
• Essex
• West Sussex
• East Sussex
• Hampshire
• Thurrock
• Isle of Wight

These areas were all in the Devolution Priority Programme and were scheduled to hold elections in 2025. The decision was implemented by the Local Authorities (Changes to Years of Ordinary Elections) (England) Order 2025.

Double postponements

Five councils which had elections postponed in 2025 applied to have their elections postponed again in 2026. These were Norfolk, Suffolk, East Sussex, West Sussex and Thurrock. Based on the reorganisation timetable that the government has set out, if the second postponement had gone ahead, councillors in these authorities would have served a six-year term, from 2021 to 2027. They would then have remained in post for a further eleven months, until 1 April 2028. This is the planned vesting day for new unitary authorities that hold elections in 2027.

There are no examples from the reorganisation processes in 2006-08 and 2017-21 of principal council elections being delayed for more than 12 months. Some parish councillors served six-year terms as a result of reorganisation in Cornwall, Wiltshire, Shropshire, Durham and Northumberland in the late 2000s.