Local Elections 2026: a political earthquake in the East of England

The May 2026 local elections have redrawn the political map of the East of England. The headline story is Reform UK’s breakthrough, taking control of Suffolk and Essex County Councils, but the wider picture is more complicated: a region splitting politically between a Reform-leaning coastal and county belt, a stronger Liberal Democrat position in parts of the Cambridge commuter arc, and Green advances in places where Labour has lost ground.

The biggest shock came in the three county councils of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, where Conservative dominance gave way to a new electoral landscape.

• Reform UK won control of Essex County Council with 53 seats, while the Conservatives fell to 13; turnout reached 43.6%, the highest for decades, according to the council.

• In Suffolk, Reform also took control, winning 41 of 70 seats, ahead of the Greens on 13 and the Conservatives on 9.

• In Norfolk, Reform emerged as the largest party with 40 seats and 31.21% of the vote, though without an outright majority; the Liberal Democrats won 13 seats, the Greens 12, Great Yarmouth First 9, and the Conservatives just 8.

That matters not only because of who won, but because of what was overturned. No party other than the Conservatives had held a majority on Norfolk, Suffolk or Essex in their current form for decades. The 2026 result therefore looks less like an ordinary mid-cycle swing and more like a collapse of an older model of county politics.

Yet the results in the East are not uniform. In and around Cambridgeshire, the story was less about Reform taking over and more about fragmentation, realignment and the continued strength of the Liberal Democrats and Greens in particular places.

• In Cambridge, Labour lost control of the city council for the first time since 2014, falling from 23 seats to 17. The Greens rose to 12 seats, the Liberal Democrats held 11, and the council moved into no overall control.

• In South Cambridgeshire, by contrast, the Liberal Democrats tightened their grip dramatically, winning 43 of 45 seats on a turnout of 47.26%

• Peterborough remained hung, although the Tories became the biggest party prompting Tory leader Wayne Fitzgerald to state, "We're not dead".

• The Conservatives were able to buck the trend in Harlow, increasing their majority on the local council.

That contrast says a great deal about the region. Reform has shown that it can convert anti-establishment feeling into institutional power in the larger county councils. But elsewhere in the East, especially in more urban, university-linked and commuter-heavy areas, voters moved in a different direction: away from Labour in some places, but not towards Reform. Cambridge’s shift towards the Greens, and South Cambridgeshire’s overwhelming Liberal Democrat result, suggest that the East is not swinging uniformly rightwards so much as fragmenting along lines of place, class, age and political culture.

The result is a region that now looks politically harder to read, but also more revealing of national pressures. Reform’s rise suggests that the Conservative vote in the East can no longer be treated as stable, especially in areas where voters are receptive to a more insurgent message on national identity, economic frustration and political disaffection. Labour, meanwhile, appears squeezed from more than one direction: by Reform in some places, by Greens and Liberal Democrats in others.

In the 2024 general election, Labour became the largest party by seats in the East of England, winning 27 constituencies, ahead of the Conservatives on 23. But it did that on just 29.4% of the vote. Labour still dominates the East at Westminster, but not on the ground in local government. This increases the tensions between central and local government in the East and provides reason for Labour MPs in the region to be fearful. Some have already broken ranks to question whether Sir Keir Starmer is the right person to lead the party forward.

There is also a final twist. These elections may be remembered not only for who won them, but because they are likely to be among the last fought on the current map of local government. Many of the councils involved are due to be replaced by larger unitary authorities over the next two years, with first elections to those new councils expected in May 2027 and elected mayors in 2028. That means the 2026 contests were both a verdict on the present and a staging post to a different institutional future.

More broadly, the East now offers one of the clearest examples of England’s political fragmentation: not the emergence of a single new order, but several rival political settlements taking shape at once.