Ministers should lose their sweeping powers to delay local elections

A day before Parliament rose for the 2025 Christmas recess, the government unexpectedly announced that it was open to delaying elections due to be held this coming May in up to 63 local areas. Councils had just three weeks to decide whether to request a delay – on grounds that this would free up their capacity to progress local government reorganisation. The government then formally announced delays in 30 areas before backtracking on the whole initiative weeks later and reinstating all the scheduled elections.

The spectacle has complicated the delivery of elections for local authorities that had just been given permission to divert resources elsewhere, put political parties under pressure to rapidly select candidates, and damaged relations between central and local government.  

Given that most of the councils where elections were to be delayed are led by Labour, this episode has invited claims that ministerial decision-making has been motivated by partisan calculations: driven by the desire to limit the losses it seems inevitable the party will suffer in May. Such perceptions are damaging at a time when public trust in government at all levels is already under strain.

The government maintains that its internal legal advice initially backed the decision to delay elections, but was then updated, with the implication being that the government feared it might lose Reform UK’s pending court challenge to its original decision. Ideally the government would now publish this advice.  

The law gives ministers excessive discretionary power to delay elections

However the final decision was reached, the extent of ministerial powers to delay elections highlights the need to review and reform the current legal framework. Amending the law to set clearer restrictions on when and how this power can be used would be good for public confidence in local democracy – and good for government too, given the mess this administration has made on this occasion.

Currently, the secretary of state faces few restrictions when postponing elections: Section 87 of the Local Government Act 2000 empowers ministers to issue orders that “change[…] the years in which the ordinary elections of councillors… are to be held”.

The government has said that amendments to the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill provide an opportunity to look again at this framework, and with the bill still making its way through Parliament there is still time to fix this problem.

Past postponements have occurred in response to emergencies such as the 2020 pandemic and the foot- and-mouth disease outbreak of 2001. In these exceptional circumstances, there was broad consensus that delay made sense. So ministers should follow a clear guiding principle that elections should proceed by default, only being delayed in exceptional circumstances, such as public health, security or environmental crises that necessitate postponement. One way forward would be to amend the law to limit local election delays to specified types of extreme situation – for instance by aligning with Civil Contingencies Act triggers, or similar scenarios.

If local authorities lack capacity to organise elections then government must provide additional support

Local capacity constraints alone should never be sufficient grounds for elections to be delayed, and the law should make that clear. If there are genuine grounds to believe that holding an election could make it impossible for a local authority to deliver other crucial services, then government should step in with additional funding or support. In this instance, ministers did eventually agree to provide additional money to facilitate this year’s elections.

But is it legitimate to cancel elections in cases where the council in question is about to be abolished, as a result of local government reorganisation, as was the context this year?  

There is a logic to the government’s argument that holding elections in such a situation can be a poor use of resources, but in our view elections should only be delayed when a final decision has already been taken about how local government will be reorganised in that area and when elections will be held. This was not the case in 2026. Furthermore, we suggest that there should be a cutoff point – government should not call off elections within six months of polling day. In general, the closer an election is, the higher the bar should be for postponement.

At the absolute minimum, a strengthened regime should explicitly remove the ability of government to postpone elections in the same area in consecutive years in non-emergency situations. County council elections were delayed in six counties on the government’s devolution priority programme in 2025, and until ministers backtracked, in four of those counties – East and West Sussex, Norfolk and Suffolk – these elections were due to be delayed once again this year. A second consecutive postponement would have pushed the democratic mandate of elected officials beyond its limits, leaving some in office for up to seven years without returning to the electorate.

The best solution would be to strip the power out entirely

An alternative – and simpler – approach would be to entirely remove this ministerial power to change local election dates via secondary legislation, and rely on the fact that government can propose election delays via primary legislation.  

Parliament has shown it can pass primary legislation swiftly in an emergency. Indeed, in the two exceptional cases noted above – Covid 19 and foot-and-mouth – elections were delayed via Acts of Parliament. The Coronavirus Act 2020  ⁷ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/coronavirus-faqs-on-postponed-election/  delayed Police and Crime Commissioner, mayoral, London Assembly and local elections. The Elections Act 2001  ⁸ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/7  delayed local elections in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. When government can secure support in both Houses these measures can pass swiftly.

This approach has two advantages. First, requiring parliamentary approval ensures greater scrutiny and can guard against ministers delaying elections for partisan reasons. Second, by actively seeking support of Parliament this opens a chance to gain a broad cross-party consensus for the changes – extreme situations often lead to common agreement on the best way to proceed. By contrast, leaving ministers with wide-ranging powers gives any government an incentive to shift election timings for partisan gain.  

The current legal position is not fit-for-purpose. Whether the power to delay local elections is fully removed or just more tightly constrained, reform is in the interests of voters, political parties and government itself.