No overall control

On Thursday 7 May, voters across England, Scotland and Wales will head to the polls. This week at the Economics Observatory, we have been examining the parties’ prospects – and what the economic backdrop tells us about how and why the political map is shifting.

Next week, voters across Great Britain will head to schools, village halls, leisure centres and other polling places to vote in thousands of local and devolved elections.

In Scotland, all 129 seats in the Scottish parliament are up for election under the additional member system, with the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) expected to remain the largest party – though short of an outright majority.

In Wales, 96 seats in the Senedd are being contested for the first time under a new proportional system with more than half as many again as the 60-seat chamber that voters chose in 2021.

In England, over 5,000 councillors will be elected across almost 3,000 wards. Councils across London, the metropolitan boroughs, and a set of county and district councils will be electing councillors for seats last up for election in 2022, and some delayed since 2025.

At the ward level, races can be hyper-local: a dodgy bus service, a failed planning application or a neglected park can secure or jeopardise re-election. But looking at country-wide polling, it’s easy to see that the political map has been redrawn.

The grip of the two main parties has ended. Last year’s local elections saw Labour and the Conservatives win the lowest share of council seats since at least the 1970s. That looks likely to accelerate, with five parties now polling in double digits. Reform UK, which saw just seven councillors elected in 2022, is leading the polls. England-wide polling shows Labour — which led in 2022 — in third place and squeezed on all sides.

Chart 1. England-wide voting intention

Source: Voting intention across the whole of England, including areas not holding council elections (JL Partners/Telegraph MRP, April 2026) compared to BBC Projected National Share (NPS) compared to 2022 local elections.
Note: 2022 Green figures were included in 2022 NPS under ‘other’.

This week, four new Observatory articles examine the prospects for elections in each of the nations, and investigate what the economic backdrop – national, sub-national and local – means for each contest.

What might happen in London?

Tony Travers explores local election prospects in London. All 32 boroughs are set to hold all-out elections, electing 1,817 councillors in total.

Although London has not always been a ‘Labour city’, the party has performed well across the capital in recent years. A combination of demographic change and issues like Brexit pushed the party far ahead of others, with it winning 42% of the vote in 2022. The Conservatives were a distant second.

Chart 2: 2022 election results

Source: Greater London Authority (1964-2022).

Four years later and Labour appears to be neck-and-neck with the Green Party for first place. Labour risks losing control of a string of inner London boroughs (Camden, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lewisham, Newham and Southwark) to the Greens.

Regardless of which way these contests land, the elections are likely to produce the most ‘no overall control’ councils in London’s history – a consequence of what YouGov’s borough-level analysis describes as all five major parties registering double-digit vote shares across the capital simultaneously.

Can Manchesterism reverse Labour’s fortunes?

Next week, elections will take place for one-third of all seats in Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs. Andy Westwood examines the contest.

As in London, Labour has been dominant in Manchester in recent years, but is now under pressure from all sides. In Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Salford and Tameside, Reform is the main threat; in the centre and south, the Greens are advancing. The Liberal Democrats are competitive in parts of Oldham and Stockport, and a proliferation of hyper-local independents represent wildcards in individual wards.

Greater Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, won’t be on the ballot, but the elections will offer local people a voice on his ‘Manchesterism‘ model.

Chart 3. Productivity in major English cities

GVA per capita (2022 GBP). ONS data following Gilmour (2026)

The city has been somewhat of an economic outlier, with annual growth of gross value added (GVA), roughly double the UK average over the last decade, and a tripling of GVA per capita this millennium. The city is also an exemplar for the devolution agenda coming to other English cities with bus franchising (the Bee Network) and improved health outcomes (fewer alcohol deaths, better GP access, cancer screening).

Still, as Andy notes, results in Manchester are unlikely to represent a complete reversal of the national picture. The city faces the same external pressures as the rest of the country, especially a cost-of-living squeeze linked to the war in Iran.

What are Scotland’s big economic choices?

Scotland’s incumbents, the SNP, are in a better position than Labour in England. The party is likely to remain the largest, though short of a majority. Reform is expected to gain representation, potentially as the largest unionist party.

Chart 4: Scotland: Latest opinion polls

Source: What Scotland thinks.

Graeme Roy, Anton Muscatelli and Stuart McIntyre look at the big economic choices facing the next Scottish parliament.

Since 2016, Scotland has exercised fiscal devolution powers, setting its own income tax bands and rates. Scotland now has a higher top rate of income tax (48%) than the rest of the UK (45%) and a lower threshold for the higher rate at £43,000, compared with £50,000 in England.

Scotland’s fiscal choices have provided the devolved government with additional revenue for public services, but this has come with costs. The nation’s slower earnings and employment growth relative to the UK average has opened up an estimated £0.8 billion tax base performance gap: revenues are lower than they would have been had Scotland tracked UK-wide growth.

At the same time, spending pressures are rising. Public sector pay alone accounts for around 55% of the day-to-day budget, and the social security caseload is growing. Real household disposable income growth, which averaged around 3% a year before the global financial crisis of 2007-09, has fallen to under 1%.

Whoever wins in Scotland will govern under tight fiscal constraints and face hard choices.

What are the big economic issues in Wales?

In Wales, polling suggests a tight race between Plaid Cymru and Reform, with Welsh Labour a distant third. Guto Ifan looks at the economic challenges facing whomever forms the next Welsh government.

The new, more proportional Senedd electoral system makes a majority government unlikely. Most analysts expect coalition negotiations to follow. Two loose blocs are possible: a broadly left grouping of Plaid, Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems, or a broadly right grouping of Reform and the Welsh Conservatives.

One area of division is tax: Reform and the Welsh Conservatives both propose 1p cuts to income tax, while most others want to expand childcare, introduce free school meals and cap bus and rail fares. No party has published detailed costings for either set of proposals.

As elsewhere, the economic backdrop is challenging. Day-to-day spending is projected to grow at just 0.7% a year in real terms over the Senedd term. If current NHS spending growth for Wales is maintained, everything else will have to face cuts.

Wales already has the highest child poverty rate of any UK nation, and a persistent productivity gap. It also experienced a larger drop in disposable incomes during the 2021-23 inflation spike than elsewhere in the UK. The new government will have limited fiscal room in which to address any of these pressing issues.

What will British politics look like after the May 2026 elections?

Local issues and challengers vary across Great Britain, but the trends across the country point to one conclusion: a breakdown, or at least fracturing, of the party configuration that has defined politics in recent years.

The insurgencies take different forms: Reform drawing on cost-of-living frustration and anti-immigration sentiment; the Greens capitalising on progressive disillusionment with Labour; and Plaid Cymru focusing on national identity and frustration with the party that has governed Wales for a quarter century. But all are being fed by a similar dissatisfaction with stagnant living standards and a growing sense that the existing political system has not delivered.

The economic evidence presented in this set of articles helps to explain the challenges to delivering change. With weak earnings growth and living standards that have barely moved in a decade, parties have little fiscal room to make or keep big promises.