A Staffordshire council facing the axe says it will not ask to postpone its elections in 2026.
All 44 seats on Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council – which covers parts of Mow Cop, Harriseahead and Newchapel – are due to be contested in the scheduled elections on 7th May, (writes local democracy reporter Phil Corrigan).
The Government has told local authorities that it could agree to postpone elections in areas affected by local government reorganisation.
Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council is to be abolished and replaced with a new unitary “super council” in 2028, meaning councillors elected next year may only serve half their four-year term.
But council leader Simon Tagg said the authority was committed to holding the elections in May as scheduled.
Coun Tagg and other members of the council’s ruling Conservative group have repeatedly voiced their opposition to the reorganisation in Staffordshire, which will see the existing 10 authorities replaced with two or more unitaries.
Coun Tagg said: “First, the Government forces local government reorganisation on communities when there wasn’t any demand for it, now it suggests delaying scheduled elections while it tries to make the change work.
“Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council has not made any move to delay its election and is proceeding as planned for May.
“The borough council is already delivering good, cost-effective services, accountable at a local level and supporters of forced reorganisation fail to explain how change will improve on the services residents already receive in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Any reorganisation will bring significant but, as yet, unknown up-front costs as staff and services are transferred, IT systems aligned and places of work reorganised.”
The Conservatives currently hold 26 seats on the borough council, while Labour have 17 and Reform UK one.
Council elections are also due to be held in Cannock Chase and Tamworth in 2026. Local government minister Alison McGovern has written to all 63 councils affected by the re-organisation that have elections scheduled for May.
She said that some councils have raised concerns over their ability to run “resource-intensive” elections at the same time as transitioning to new authorities. But she said the Government will only postpone elections in areas where the council had requested it due to capacity issues.
The Government has said that replacing the current two-tier system of councils with larger unitaries will lead to more efficient and cost effective local government.
A number of proposals for reorganisation have been put forward by councils in Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent, including dividing the county into northern and southern, or eastern and western unitaries. No council is in favour of the change.
The Government is in the process of deciding which model will be adopted.
Under the current timetable, elections to the new authorities will be held in May 2027, with those councils going live in April 2028.
Reform UK is currently leading in the polls, and the party would expected to make major gains in next year’s elections, having won landslide victories in Staffordshire and elsewhere in 2025.
County Coun Martin Murray, the acting leader of Staffordshire County Council, has hit out at the possibility of the elections being postponed.
He said: “It is hugely disappointing that, instead of a conversation around genuine devolution and the benefits that could bring to the county, the Government is more interested in a conversation around delaying local democracy.
“There was no public mandate for local government reorganisation and there is definitely no public mandate to cancel what would be our last ever district and borough elections.
“Any delay is not just for one year. With the added transition year into a new unitary authority, it will be another two years with no elections. As a result, some councillors will have served a six-year term.”
