The Liberal Democrats have taken command at County Hall following Thursday’s local elections despite a surge in Reform UK support which saw the Conservatives lose 33 of the 40 seats they held going into the elections and Labour all six of its seats.
The Liberal Democrats won 27 of Devon County Council’s 60 seats, gaining seventeen to finish four short of an outright majority.
The party is expected to govern alongside the Green Party after it won six seats, including three in Exeter. Two East Devon Independents, one of whom – Jess Bailey – won more than 63% of the votes in her Otter Valley division, are also expected to take part.
Reform will become the official opposition at County Hall after winning eighteen seats.
Eighteen Conservative county councillors stood down before the ballot, while another fifteen stood for re-election and lost, including Cabinet members Lois Samuel, Phil Bullivant, Phil Twiss and Stuart Hughes.
Labour lost in all seven of the divisions it won at the 2021 county elections, all of which are in Exeter, leaving the party shut out of decision-making at County Hall. Four of its councillors stood down, while Labour group leader Carol Whitton and Yvonne Atkinson both stood for re-election and lost.
Rob Hannaford, who quit Exwick & St. Thomas after holding the seat since 2005, first for the Liberal Democrats then for Labour, stood for the Conservatives in Duryard & Pennsylvania and also lost.
Reform UK surged, as it did everywhere elections were held on Thursday, with the party winning 27% of the Devon County Council vote overall, only 1% less the Liberal Democrats.
Its support was unevenly distributed, ranging from less than 23% in South Hams – the only district in which it did not win a seat – to nearly 32% in Torridge, where it won three of five seats.
Reform finished neck and neck with the Liberal Democrats across Torridge, but the Liberal Democrats only won one seat in the district despite receiving four more votes than Reform.
The first-past-the-post voting system combined with Devon district and division boundaries to produce perverse outcomes elsewhere in the county too.
While Reform won the largest share of the vote across West Devon, and ended up with three of four seats, it also did so across East Devon, but only ended up with two of the district’s ten seats.
The Liberal Democrats, who received nearly 600 fewer votes than Reform, nevertheless won five East Devon seats.
In Exeter, Labour won the largest share of the vote, 3% more than Reform, but ended up with no seats at all.
Compared with the 2021 county council elections, the Liberal Democrat vote tally increased by more than 50% to nearly 69,000 of the 243,000 votes that were cast across Devon this year.
Reform, however, received nearly 66,000 votes after polling only 424 in the divisions in which it stood candidates in 2021, while Labour and Conservative vote tallies both more than halved and the number of votes cast for Greens, Independents and other candidates all fell too.
The Conservatives recorded the biggest vote losses across the county after winning nearly 43% of the vote in 2021, falling from just under 109,000 to just over 53,000 votes – although this was still nearly three times the Labour tally.
Labour support in Devon is concentrated in Exeter, so its vote losses were concentrated here too, polling 6,600 fewer votes than last time to record a tally of 8,900 votes.
Across the rest of the county the party lost another 15,000 votes, with fewer than 1,500 people now voting for Labour in five of Devon’s eight district council areas.
Both Labour and Conservative vote share fell in all nine Exeter county council divisions. In the seven seats Labour won in 2021, where the vote share change from 2021 was largely at Labour’s expense, its vote share fell significantly.
The Conservatives also lost significant shares of the vote in seven of nine Exeter divisions.
In contrast, the Liberal Democrats and Greens increased their vote shares from the 2021 elections in all divisions except one each.
Both parties’ best results were vote share increases around 13.5%. But in most Exeter divisions Labour and Conservative vote losses went mostly to Reform, which won vote shares ranging from 14% to 34%.
The exception was Duryard & Pennsylvania, where the swing in favour of both progressive parties combined was slightly greater than the vote share received by Reform.
Michael Mitchell won for the Liberal Democrats, with Labour second and Reform a distant third.
Reform came an even more distant third in St. David’s & Haven Banks, where Andy Ketchin won the city’s most decisive victory for the Greens.
Reform’s poorest performance was in St. Sidwell’s & St. James, where it received just under 14% of the vote and finished even further behind both Labour and Green Party winner Thomas Richardson, who is the youngest member of the new Devon County Council administration.
The result was close: 68 votes separated Labour and the Greens. In Heavitree & Whipton Barton the margin was even tighter, with the Greens’ Jack Eade finishing 35 votes ahead of Reform, and Labour only eight votes behind Reform in third place.
The closest margin of victory in the city was in Exwick & St. Thomas, where Reform’s Tony Stevens won by just 22 votes. His brother Neil Stevens won alongside for the party in Alphington & Cowick in another close contest.
Reform’s win in Wonford & St. Loye’s was somewhat more decisive, with Angela Nash finishing 107 votes ahead of the Conservatives.
However its largest winning margin in the city was 198 votes, sending local party chair Edward Hill to represent Pinhoe & Mincinglake on the same day the party also won an Exeter City Council by-election in Mincinglake & Whipton.
Exeter’s longest-serving county councillor Andrew Leadbetter was the only incumbent to survive. He held his Wearside & Topsham seat for the Conservatives despite a near 17% vote share loss.
He will rejoin Andrea Davis, who held her seat in North Devon to become the only other Conservative county Cabinet member to be re-elected, in a tiny Conservative minority group at County Hall.
Whether or not the Labour/Conservative duopoly is now dead in Devon, the Liberal Democrats’ return to power at County Hall is likely to have a significant impact on regional local government reorganisation – the most important political issue in the county by a country mile.
Julian Brazil, who has just been emphatically re-elected to his Kingsbridge seat and is also South Hams District Council leader, was chosen yesterday to lead the Liberal Democrats at County Hall.
Jacqui Hodgson, his South Hams District Council Executive colleague, who has also been leading the Greens at County Hall, has just been re-elected for a third term with the second-highest vote share in Devon – nearly 62%.
Paul Arnott, who has just won Seaton & Colyton for the party and also leads East Devon District Council, was chosen as County Hall Liberal Democrat deputy leader at the same time.
He is accompanied in the new administration by Paul Hayward, his colleague and deputy leader of East Devon District Council, who has just won Axminster as an Independent.
Julian Brazil and Paul Arnott have been key advocates of the proposal to divide the county into three new unitary authorities that has already been endorsed by seven of Devon’s eight district councils – all run by Liberal Democrats or Liberal Democrats and Independents – and Torbay too.
The devil remains in the detail, not least the proposed new unitary boundaries, which complied with the government’s instruction to use existing district council boundaries as building blocks and now need refining, if not rearranging to create four new authorities instead of three.
But the primary obstacles that were frustrating this approach were the preceding county council administration’s procrastination and the city council’s determination to go it alone, regardless.
Now not only are the Liberal Democrats in command at County Hall, the relationships between their leaders and the other political groups whose support they need to govern are already in place – not to mention cemented in parts of the county that Exeter City Council was ready to throw under a bus.
From now on, as the local government reorganisation process gets properly under way, alignment between all bar one of Devon’s districts, backed by Torbay and led by the county council, is likely to make Exeter’s intransigence impossible to sustain, opening the way to a consensus-driven outcome.
Over the border in Cornwall, similar changes have just taken place. The Conservatives lost 32 seats in Thursday’s elections to leave the party with just seven of the 87 seats on Cornwall Council.
Reform gained 27 seats to become the largest party but remain sixteen short of being able to govern.
The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, added thirteen to the thirteen they already held and the Independents held on to sixteen seats and with them most of the balance of power.
How the conundrum of no overall control in Cornwall can be solved, with Labour now holding four seats and the Greens and Mebyon Kernow three each, remains to be seen.
However it may be that Liberal Democrats, Independents and others can find common cause on both sides of the Tamar in search of a peninsula-wide devolution agreement that might actually transform South West regional government for the better, even with Reform in the room.
