Keith Best is a former Conservative MP and Chairman of Conservative Action for Electoral Reform
It is not a particularly penetrating insight to say that the recent local elections were very bad for the Conservative Party. The night saw losses exceed the 1,000 seats Ministers had briefed to manage expectations – and came close to the disastrous results of 2019. The focus in the immediate aftermath and since has, understandably, been on the national vote shares and how they augur for the next general election.
Yet, although the results are not auspicious for the party’s national prospects, there is another pernicious trend that is emerging that could affect the party’s fortunes nationally as well as locally: that is how the First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system is affecting the Conservatives in key battlegrounds.
On the night, the headline-grabbing result was Bracknell Forest, in Berkshire, which illustrated starkly just how distorted results under FPTP can be against the Conservatives.
Here the party lost control of a council it had run since its creation in 1998 with its number of seats plummeting from 38 to 10. You would expect such a drastic reversal in fortunes to reflect a vertiginous fall in support from the electorate. In fact, this 66 per cent drop in seats came from just a six per cent decline in vote-share compared to 2019. The Conservatives secured just 24 per cent of the seats despite winning 42 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, Labour won 22 seats, or 54 per cent of the total available, on just 30 per cent of the vote. In total, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens hoovered up just over three-quarters of the seats (76 per cent) while winning just over half (56 per cent) of the votes. The result is that the residents of Bracknell Forest now have a Labour-majority council, even though the Tories were the largest party in terms of vote-share by a clear margin. The result throws in to sharp relief just how damaging FPTP can be when parties of the left start to co-operate against the Conservatives.
However, the local elections also confirmed another concerning trend that could have greater impact on the party’s national fortunes as FPTP is rapidly eroding the progress the Conservatives have made in electorally key areas such as the Red Wall.
Research by the Electoral Reform Society shows that at the 2021 local elections, the first held since the Tory breakthrough in the Red Wall at the 2019 general election, the party made significant progress in council wards that make up the Red Wall constituencies in the North of England and the Midlands. However, in the most recent local elections, in 2023, FPTP contributed to a considerable weakening in the Conservative position in these key areas. Analysis of 73 council wards mapped across nine Red Wall constituencies that the Conservatives took from Labour at the general election of 2019, including Burnley, Dudley North and Great Grimsby, showed that in 2018 the Tories secured 22 per cent of council seats despite winning 32 per cent of the vote, suffering a 10-point vote to seat share deficit. Meanwhile, in the same year, FPTP artificially boosted Labour’s dominance of those areas by seeing it secure 66 per cent of seats from just 48 per cent of the vote, enjoying an 18-point surplus in seats to vote share.
In the years since the 2019 break-through, the Conservatives started to narrow the gap with Labour and in 2021 secured 37 percent of seats on 41 percent of the vote, reducing the seat to vote-share deficit to four points. However, 2023 saw the Conservative progress fall back as the party secured just 14 per cent of seats, despite claiming 28 per cent of the vote, meaning the party now has a greater seat to vote-shared deficit (14 points) than in 2018. Conversely, despite Labour only increasing their vote share by 1.4 points in 2023 compared with 2022 to 48 per cent, it saw its share of seats across these wards surge 11 points to 70 per cent, with FPTP gifting them a seat to vote-share surplus of 22 points, even higher than in 2018.
The upshot is that areas with sitting Conservative MPs where there is a considerable Tory vote are not getting their due share of Conservative representation at local authority level. This is a problem in simple democratic terms, as people are not getting what they vote for and means that whole swathes of the country are consigned to Labour councils and the higher council tax that follows.
Yet, it also has greater implications for the party’s efforts to hold onto these electorally significant areas in a general election.
If the Conservatives obtained the councillors in those areas that their vote merited it would mean more Conservative representatives on the ground and voters seeing them serving their communities. The party would become a more meaningful and visible presence in the Red Wall, which would in turn enable the party to build more sustainable support from the ground up. Instead, FPTP suppresses Conservative representation in the Red Wall, artificially boosts Labour, and re-enforces the perception that the areas are innately Labour-supporting.
This under-representation also stifles talent coming into the party as people who could become Conservative councillors in their communities don’t as they have no viable electoral prospects. This narrows the pool of people coming through who could be able Conservative councillors and eventually able MPs and cabinet members.
These examples strengthen the argument for the party supporting a fairer and more representative electoral system for local government, such as the single transferable vote (STV) that is used in Scotland for council elections. It maintains the vital constituency link between councillors and their wards but also ensures parties get the seats that their vote-share has earned. If brought in for England, it would mean areas would get the Conservative representation and governance they voted for. It would also allow the party to make sustained gains locally in areas that have moved towards the Conservatives in general elections. Scotland is a good indicator of the potential this could unlock, as after 1997 when the party was wiped out in its parliamentary seats its revival under the stewardship of Ruth Davidson saw it supplant Labour as the second largest party in the 2017 local elections.
Proportional representation is not a cause that is universally supported in the party but the way the electoral maths is moving against us is stark and concerning.
Switching to a proportional system, such as the one the party has thrived under in Scotland, is a way to stop left alliances locking the Tories out of the representation their vote share should entitle them to. It is also a way of solidifying and building on advances made nationally, such as in the Red Wall. In short, the Conservatives could be one of the biggest beneficiaries from a move to a more proportional electoral system for local elections.