Talk:Political make-up of local councils in the United Kingdom

2012 Elections Update
The data for this page is now mostly out of date. Does anyone want to be brave enough to update the data to reflect the results of the 2012 local elections? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.251.117.40 (talk) 14:28, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm updating the information for Scottish and Welsh total councillors by Party. It's an easy place to start. 2.220.143.24 (talk) 14:07, 11 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks very much for the work you've done so far. Although I've spent many hours on format and readability (partly from purely personal frustration with trying to read an earlier version), I've never invested time in the formidable amount of substantial detail. (A parallel would be trying to list all the local government compositions in New England, California, Canada or Australia.)
 * However, because your work is still in progress, there's currently an inconsistency in the first overall table that (wrongly) makes it look wrong. The new totals for SNP or Green representation in Scots Unitary Authorities are now greater than those shown in the column for the whole of Great Britain (i.e. England, Scotland, Wales, Orkney, Shetland & Cornwall, but not Northern Ireland or the City of London, let alone Man, the Scillies or the Channel Islands). I suppose I could clumsily tweak this myself by re-adding each row from the right, but I'd be more confident if someone who'd started the actual updates could fix this column as new individual data (cells, rows and columns) are revised. Thanks again. —— Shakescene (talk) 14:57, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
 * For Wales, I added the May 2013 results for Anglesey and resolved a one-seat discrepancy in Carmarthenshire (one independent hadn't been counted). I then added up the totals and entered them on both the Welsh Unitary Authority table and the overall one for Great Britain as a whole. Scotland adds up correctly right now with the old 2011 results; I'm not sure if there were Scots Unitary Authority elections in 2012 or 2013, but after every general election some councillors cross the aisle and some vacancies appear to be filled at bye-elections. —— Shakescene (talk) 13:28, 12 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm going to take a stab at updating the tables. It looks like the parties in control are correct, but the numbers of councilors are incorrect for Unitary authorites and District councils. Also, some unitary authorities have been wrongly included in the County Council section (like Cornwall and Northumberland). Please bear with me whilst I make the changes. Thanks.IpswichBlue77 (talk) 16:04, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
 * County council figures now updated and these have been reflected in the main table (the totals will not add up yet). IpswichBlue77 (talk) 17:01, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I have completed most of the updates now. The only sections that still need updating are 1) The councilor numbers for the District councils, which is a mammoth task which I'll try and tackle this week!...and 2) I have updated the totals for the main parties in the summary table at the top of the page, however I haven't done this for the smaller parties as I don't have accurate figures. Might I suggest that we create a new summary table which just shows the totals for the main parties and groups the smaller parties / independents together as "Others"? This table very rarely gets updated and the fact that it includes so many smaller, unknown parties makes updating so much harder. Anyone else agree with this idea? I'd love to hear any alternative ideas also? IpswichBlue77 (talk) 00:10, 21 July 2013 (UTC)
 * District council councillor numbers have now been updated. :) IpswichBlue77 (talk) 01:59, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

County Council
The County Council results are now completely updated according to the official government websites posted as references. Any mistakes lay in these websites.Bwalltown (talk) 19:37, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

May 2010 result
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/table/2010/may/07/local-elections and http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/election2010/council/html/region_99999.stm. Fences &amp;  Windows  17:31, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Defections and loose alliances
I've updated the Herefordshire numbers for a death. The council website does not show a Green as in the article but shows two members as Alliance for Accountability and Democracy which I think we would count as Independents and local parties. One of the two was elected as a Green and his website says "Gerald and the Hereford & South Herefordshire Green Party are members of the Herefordshire Alliance for Accountability and Democracy on Herefordshire Council. Gerald will continue to campaign as a Green Party Councillor on the even more important issues of sustainability which cannot be effectively addressed whilst Council processes are in such disarray and democracy is held in contempt."

The other was elected as a Liberal Democrat, supported the Conservatives at the General Election but says "However, I remain an Independent in an Alliance with Cllr Dawe of the Green Party and that is where my allegiance remains."

It seems odd to record one of these as a Green and the other as an Independent but that seems the best approach.Cavrdg (talk) 12:54, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Future Improvements
Is it possible to alter the way the tables work, so that they can be copied into Excel? This would be very useful for anyone wishing to use these figures for analysis. 09:58, 19 April 2012‎ -- [signature added by Shakescene: please add four tildes like this ~ after your entries on a talk page to sign and date them.]
 * I'm not sure what kinds of things you want to move into Excel. I've always been able to copy Wikipedia tables and paste them onto an Excel 2000 spreadsheet. If it isn't working for you, try the Excel pull down commands Edit > Paste Special > Text (and if that doesn't work, try HTML, Unicode or other alternatives). But there may be other features you want to copy, such a sortability or tint; let us know what works. There are also ways to convert an Excel spreadsheet as a whole into a Wikipedia table without copying every line or cell individually. See Help:Table. —— Shakescene (talk) 14:49, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

2014 Update
So much of the information is out of date, I've been updating (and trying to reorganise & condense) it here and there, but I'm aware that I must be missing a lot & making some mistakes. If anyone has any suggestions on a better system, I'm all ears.Iliekinfo (talk) 01:32, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

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2016 - Completely Misleading
This article is fundamentally flawed and should be removed if not updated. If you validate West Lancashire it is clearly Labour by a big majority. The subject page says Conservative Executive based on some ONS data that obviously hasn't been updated in several years. This summary says NOC which is plain wrong but insists it reflects the 2026 results which it doesn't. Someone clearly got clever in deciding to rely on external data sources. When that data fails and/or isn't updated the whole thing becomes nonsense. If no-one can and wants to maintain it then remove it and let people do things the old fashioned way. 146.90.93.167 (talk) 12:17, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Suggestion - columns
Totals needing updated after every by-election (this guy might be a good source) obviously makes this page pretty high-risk. How about a "last election" column? That way, at least if no editors come by the place for a while, there's at least a date stamp on each council's makeup. samillar94 (talk) 02:49, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

I've now seen where all of the data on this page comes from. The tables on the original site already have "updated" columns - it's just a matter of copying these and converting to d mmm yyyy. He doesn't usually give the year, so some extra validation required. samillar94 (talk) 04:36, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Other things I meant to mention... Open Council Data has majority and control in separate columns (he looks up who runs minority councils). We should keep that layout rather than combining the data with line breaks, which currently makes the tables far longer than they need to be. Font size could then be reduced to compensate for expanding horizontally - I've trialled an 80% font size in the NI table.

Finally, just to note that where this page really adds value to OCD is the council URL column - kudos to whoever did that. samillar94 (talk) 04:45, 5 May 2017 (UTC)


 * (Talking to myself here...) Implemented the last election column, separate coalition column and font size 90%. Not copying the "Updated" column from OCD - better to dig out the actual by-election/election date. Also realised @Jlwsn who edited this page earlier in the year must be the editor of Open Council Data - hey :)  sa m  (talk) 13:06, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

4 May 2017 elections
A flurry of changes to come from the elections. It'll be easiest to wait until John Lawson at Open Council Data or someone else does their thing, and then copy the new columns into existing tables via the Visual Editor - checking in Excel that the councils are definitely, positively in the same order. samillar94 (talk) 04:57, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi. I'll be updating Open Council Data over the next week or so as councils update their pages. I'll make a note here when it's done so we can get this page up to date. Jlwsn (talk) 18:13, 5 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Hey - fantastic! :)  sa m  (talk) 19:53, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Site is up-to-date with election results. I'm currently on the hunt for coalition deals as they come in. About half are up at the moment. Jlwsn (talk) 10:35, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

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2017 Updates
hi can somebody update the Summary of councilors section because its not been updated since 1 Feb 2017, since the may elections, and since people in ukip leaving the party. Can Somebody Updates the section thanks. Torygreen84 (talk) 05:41, 27 July 2017 (UTC) hello. Torygreen84 (talk) 10:03, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Hey -- so you should check out Open Council Data (link on page). Nobody's had time to copy the data across from there let alone update that summary, and anyway there are so many council seats that the figures change multiple times a week!! But since those elections it really is due a nappy change. Care to help us out? :)  sam 💬 20:49, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

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Adopt a Council: a proposal
Folks, this is a super-high-maintenance page. Currently I'm managing (mostly) to keep up with changes to composition of Northern Ireland councils, and have made a start on missing council election pages for Wales, but have no hope of keeping the rest of the tables to the same standard.

So I'm proposing we get a crack team together, working with Jon at Open Council Data to keep this really useful resource up to speed. What say ye? I'll raise this with WikiProject UK too.  sam 💬 11:43, 27 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Discussion opened on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom --  sam 💬 15:20, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Remove UKIP from major party heading?
After two consecutive almost-complete wipeouts, UKIP are now guaranteed to end up with less than 90 councillors, and probably, when all is said and done, well below that. Given the very few council seats they now hold, does UKIP now warrant a column entry? Sceptre (talk) 11:35, 4 May 2018 (UTC)


 * I agree that UKIP should be removed from the tables. I will begin the process of that now. FollowTheTortoise (talk) 20:59, 26 March 2021 (UTC)


 * ✅ FollowTheTortoise (talk) 21:04, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Moray
Should Moray be updated for this or should we wait for the outcome of the talks? ''The move leaves five independent councillors and one non-aligned Conservative as a minority-ruling administration. The council leader is in talks with opposition parties.''Cavrdg (talk) 19:21, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Leap Years
The section on District councils gives the characteristic of timeing of elections as I think this is using a shorthand as leap years being those divisable by 4. However the actual definition is a bit more complex involving condition of divisability by 100 and 400. The first problematic year to come would 2100 which is divisable by 4 but is not a leep year. --Salix alba (talk): 10:56, 5 May 2019 (UTC)
 * The 58 that elect to a third of their seats all do so in leap years, two years after leap years and three years after,

Terminology and improvements
I think that we need to clear up the terminology used in this article. According to the NALC, local council is a universal term for community, neighbourhood, parish and town councils. Perhaps confusingly, local council is also used by nidirect for the layer of government immediately below the devolved Assembly and Executive in Northern Ireland.

In this article, local councils under the NALC definition are not included but local councils in Northern Ireland are. In addition to local councils in Northern Ireland, local authorities in England (local authority is the terminology used by the UK government and is not necessarily synonymous with principal council, so the former should be exclusively used), local authorities in Scotland (as per the terminology used by the Scottish Government) and principal councils in Wales (as per the terminology used by the Welsh Government) are included.

Firstly, I think that we need to be consistent with the language that we use, for the sake of the reader, and I believe that the bolded terms included above are the best ones to use.

Secondly, we need to perhaps rename the article and work out what should be included in it. I am convinced that we shouldn't include local councils in England, community councils in Scotland and community councils in Wales (there doesn't seem to be any layer below local council in Northern Ireland) because of how much work it would be, how long the article would have to be and whether there are the sources that have this information. However, I do think that it would be worth including the 10 combined authorities and the Greater London Authority for England here, as well as the Police(, Fire) and Crime Commissioners. And we could even include the devolved legislatures and Parliament if we wanted to, for the sake of completeness (it really wouldn't take that much work). This then could lead to a new article title of 'Political make-up of elected bodies in the United Kingdom' with it being noted in the introduction that this article doesn't include local councils in England and community councils in Scotland and Wales. Finally, the article could include council leaders/elected mayors, which is something that I know has been attempted before for all four UK countries with varying levels of success. My hope is that by putting all of this information into one article, it will gain more traction and thus editors and that it will be easier to update when new information appears. I don't mind carrying out these edits (as well as updating the article following the recent elections), but I wanted to get my ideas all down in one place and give the opportunity for comments before I went ahead with them (when I get the time). So, what does anybody else think? FollowTheTortoise (talk) 12:29, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Green Parties
Should the Summary table combine or otherwise indicate the councillors for the other Green parties (Scottish Greens and Green Party Northern Ireland)? At first glance, there appear to be no Green councillors in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you need to follow the link to find out that it refers to the Green Party of England and Wales in particular. At the moment, these parties are presumably counted as 'Others'. 88.144.128.251 (talk) 16:32, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Wales Chart - Monmouthshire needs to be updated since their AGM in May 2023
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_make-up_of_local_councils_in_the_United_Kingdom

Since the AGM of the Monmouthshire local authority on May 18, 2023, it is governed by a coalition between the Labour group of 22 and the newly formed Green Independent Group of two who have joined to together to give overall control to this coalition group. Cllr Ian Chandler and Cllr Merion Howells formed the green independent group a day before the AGM to facilitate this change.

I normally edit pages myself but this is represented in a graphic chart by Wikipedia and I do not feel competent to make this amendment. Sorry --

81.170.50.143 (talk) 12:15, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
 * _Steve Hoselitz_*

Threshold for "others"
The bottom of the summary table has a row for "Other parties and independents". What is the threshold above which a party gets listed and below which it gets folded into "others"? Which "other parties" does it currently contain? Parties are listed with single-digit seat counts, including one with a single councillor. Should some of those smaller parties with only a handful of seats be rolled into "others"? 86.164.84.23 (talk) 02:18, 10 July 2024 (UTC)