136-Council Election Projections: The Full Results

Reform UK goes from zero councils to sixty-seven. Labour goes from ninety-two to sixteen. That is the headline from our V2 projections covering all 136 English councils contesting the 7 May 2026 local elections.

This is not a vote share estimate. These are council control projections, seat projections, and net change figures for every party across every council. The predictions were generated by 65,000 census-weighted synthetic personas using a proprietary language model fine-tuned for persona simulation, corrected through 14 statistical layers and grounded against 6 external datasets. The full prediction file was hashed before publication.

These numbers supersede our earlier 20-council predictions published in March. The V2 run covers the complete contest: 136 councils, 5,034 projected seats, every party, every region.

National Vote Share

Across all 136 councils:

Reform UK leads nationally on vote share. The Conservatives hold second, ahead of Labour, which is a reversal of the 2024 general election order. The Liberal Democrats are within striking distance of Labour. The Greens are projected at 7%, corrected upwards from the raw model output which systematically underestimates them.

Council Control

This is the table that matters. Who runs which councils after 7 May:

Reform UK is projected to take control of 67 councils, having held none before the election. Nearly all of these come at Labour's expense. Labour drops from 92 councils to 16, losing control in every region outside inner London. The Liberal Democrats double their council count. The Conservatives lose a net 10 councils but hold on better than Labour, retaining footholds in county councils and affluent suburban districts.

Projected Seats

Net seat changes across 5,034 contested seats:

Reform UK is projected to win over 2,000 seats from a standing start. Labour loses nearly 2,500 seats. The Liberal Democrats gain close to 600. The Conservatives lose 210, a more contained decline than Labour's collapse. The Green Party picks up 9 seats, concentrated in university cities.

London vs Rest of England

London (32 boroughs)

London is the one region where Labour survives in meaningful numbers. Inner London boroughs like Hackney, Islington, Camden, and Lambeth remain Labour, although with reduced majorities. The Conservatives hold affluent outer boroughs like Bromley and Havering. The Liberal Democrats take Richmond, Kingston, Sutton, and expand into Merton and Wandsworth. Reform UK takes five outer east London boroughs where Leave voting, white working-class demographics, and anti-immigration sentiment converge: Barking and Dagenham, Bexley, Hillingdon, Redbridge, and Enfield.

Rest of England (104 councils)

Outside London, the picture is stark. Reform UK takes 62 of 104 councils. The party dominates post-industrial towns in the North East, Yorkshire, the East Midlands, and the West Midlands. They take former Labour strongholds that have been trending rightward since the Brexit referendum: Sunderland, Doncaster, Barnsley, Wigan, Rotherham, Wakefield, Stoke, Derby, Wolverhampton. They also take traditionally Conservative councils where the right-wing vote has consolidated around Reform rather than returning to the Conservatives: parts of Essex, Kent, Lincolnshire, and the East of England.

Labour clings on in just four councils outside London: Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, and Bristol. Even these are projected as narrow holds.

What the Personas Are Saying

The numbers tell the story. The reasoning traces behind them explain why.

Reform dominance in post-industrial towns. The personas driving Reform's gains are consistent in their reasoning: cost of living, immigration, a sense that Labour took their vote for granted and delivered nothing. A 58-year-old former steelworker in Rotherham says he voted Labour for thirty years but "they don't care about people like me any more." A 45-year-old care worker in Sunderland says she switched because "nobody else is even talking about the things that matter." These are not protest votes. They are considered realignments by people who have been moving away from Labour since 2016 and have now found a home.

Liberal Democrat strength in affluent suburbs. The Lib Dem gains are concentrated in a different demographic entirely: educated, professional, homeowning voters in affluent areas. Richmond, Kingston, Bath, Cheltenham, Eastbourne. These personas are socially liberal, economically moderate, and deeply unimpressed by both major parties. They reward strong local campaigning, and in areas where the Lib Dems have a visible ground presence, they are hoovering up disaffected Conservatives who cannot stomach Reform and former Labour voters who want competence rather than ideology.

Labour clinging on in inner London. Labour's surviving councils share a specific demographic profile: young, diverse, highly educated, often renting, often working in the public sector or creative industries. These personas remain Labour largely by elimination rather than enthusiasm. They are disappointed by Starmer but see no credible alternative that could actually form a government. In cities with a strong Green presence, Labour's hold is weakest.

Pre-registration

The full prediction dataset was hashed before publication. The SHA-256 hash of the complete 136-council prediction file is:

sha256:e873495f33e0cef89b32138e5b1d7cdb6dbaec6a81b602291db832e2601bde2d

This hash was generated from the JSON file containing all council-level vote shares, seat projections, and council control calls. After 7 May, anyone can verify that the predictions published here match the pre-registered file by comparing hashes. We cannot change the numbers after seeing results.

The full prediction file and verification script are available on GitHub: github.com/Kronaxis/kpm1-election-projections

Comparison with Other Forecasters

Professor Stephen Fisher at Oxford publishes projected net seat changes based on national polling and historical swing patterns. His most recent numbers project Labour losing around 800 seats and the Conservatives losing around 300, with Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats making large gains. Our projections are directionally aligned but more extreme on the Labour losses and Reform gains.

A direct comparison is difficult because Fisher covers a different set of councils and uses a different methodology (uniform national swing applied to ward-level baselines). Our approach is bottom-up: individual personas making individual decisions, aggregated and corrected. The two methods should converge on the direction of travel even if they disagree on magnitude.

We are deliberately publishing before the election so the comparison can be made on the record. If our projections are closer to reality than uniform swing models, it validates the persona-based approach. If they are further away, we will publish exactly where and why we were wrong.

What Happens Next

1 May: We will rerun the full 136-council projection with the latest national polling data, capturing any late campaign shifts. The V3 predictions will be published and hashed.

6 May: Final pre-election update with ward-level disaggregation for the 20 earliest-declaring councils.

7 May, from 11pm: Live results tracker. We have identified the 20 councils that declare first (Sunderland by midnight, then London boroughs, then northern cities by 4am) and 8 bellwether councils with specific signals to watch. Real results will be compared against our projections in real time as they come in.

8 May onwards: Complete accuracy report. Every correct call and every wrong call, with analysis of where the model succeeded and where it failed. No cherrypicking. If we hit 65%+ accuracy on council control and national vote shares within 4 points per party, the experiment has worked. If we miss, we will explain precisely why.

Methodology: How We Project the 2026 Local Elections: Every Step Explained

Earlier predictions: Predicting the 7 May Elections (20-council V1)

GitHub: Full data, code, and pre-registration hash

DYNAMICS-8 framework: Zenodo preprint (CC BY 4.0)