Angela Rayner has cancelled local elections this year for 5.5 million people amid growing outrage over steep council tax hikes in a move condemned by Reform leader Nigel Farage as his party gains in the polls. The Telegraph has more.
Just weeks before the planned polling day, the Deputy Prime Minister announced that elections in nine areas, including Surrey, Norfolk, Suffolk and Thurrock, would be postponed to allow for a reorganisation of local authorities.
The average tax Band D bill is set to rise by 5% in these areas.
It comes as Ms Rayner pushes through a wholesale reorganisation of local authorities, with district councils scrapped and merged into counties to produce new unitary councils.
The Deputy Prime Minister said this meant that in many cases there would be no point in voters electing a county council when another one would have to be held a year later for its new unitary guise.
Reform had been expected to surge in the local elections after the recently-formed party topped opinion polls. The move will deny it the opportunity to build support and funding across much of the south.
Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, criticised the “cowardice of the political class” over the move. In a hastily-arranged press conference, he said: “I thought only dictators cancelled elections.”
He said the decision had been taken with the “connivance of a now terrified Labour Party… and Conservative-led councils who of course want to keep the money rolling for at least another couple of years”.
He added: “The reorganisation of local government is going to take up to three years to complete, and given that the term for a county councillor is four years, there is absolutely no justification for cancelling the elections for five and a half million people other than the cowardice of the existing political class.”
Ms Rayner said elections, due this May, would be delayed by a year in East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey – all Conservative county councils – in the Isle of Wight, which is run by independents, and in Thurrock, which is controlled by Labour.
She told the Commons: “The Government’s starting point is for all elections to go ahead unless there is a strong justification for postponement, and the bar is high – and rightly so.
“I am only agreeing to half of the requests that were made. After careful consideration, I’ve only agreed to postpone elections in places where this is central to our manifesto promise to deliver devolution.
“We’re not in the business of holding elections to bodies that won’t exist and where we don’t know what will replace them. This would be an expensive and irresponsible waste of taxpayers’ money, and any party calling for these elections to go ahead must explain how this waste would be justifiable.”
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