The Green party has hailed what it has described as “phenomenal” local election results, as it headed above 80 gains in areas including South Tyneside, Cumberland, Oxford and Worcester. Following the pattern of recent local elections, in which the Greens have both won more seats and extended the geographical spread of their representation, by Friday night the party had won 156 seats, with a net gain of 81. It took seats from both Labour and the Conservatives. Illustrating again how the party is competing in areas that would not have been seen as strongholds only a few years ago, the Greens made three gains on South Tyneside council, taking two seats from Labour and one from the Tories. The party now has six seats, making it the second largest on the council, albeit well behind still-dominant Labour. In Burnley, where the Greens secured their first councillor in 2018, they gained one seat from the Conservatives by 11 votes. In Hastings in East Sussex, three gains moved the council from being Labour-run to no overall control. In Oxford, the Green party’s four victories included three gains, one of which unseated a longstanding and senior Labour councillor, Colin Cook, formerly lord mayor of the city. In Worcester, a Green gain helped push the council from being Conservative-run into no overall control, a result the Tory leader, Marc Bayliss, said was a “bad night” for his party, something he argued was caused in part by voter concern at lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street. The Greens also gained their first councillor in Plymouth, and took two seats in the elections for the newly created Cumberland council. These results on Friday were mainly for England, with Wales and Scotland – in the latter, the Greens are a separate organisation – being declared later. In one early Scottish result, the SNP leader of Glasgow city council has been overtaken by the Scottish Greens on first preference votes in the city’s Langside ward. New candidate Holly Bruce topped the ballot with 3,173 first-preference votes, while the SNP’s Susan Aitken received 2,899.
Adrian Ramsay, the Greens’ co-leader, who took over the role with Carla Denyer in October last year, said the expectation was that further gains would come: “The phenomenal results for the Green party so far demonstrate that people up and down the country are looking for a credible alternative to the establishment parties, and finding it in us. “Whether that’s former Conservative voters put off by poor handling of the Covid pandemic or the constant leadership lies, or former Labour voters who just see weak opposition at a national and local level. “Greens are putting forward the practical solutions to the cost of living crisis and the climate emergency that will make a difference to people’s lives, from insulating homes to bringing down energy bills and creating jobs, to providing additional financial support for those on the lowest incomes.” Elsewhere, in one of the more niche if most bitterly contested subplots of the local elections, candidates who explicitly opposed the schemes known as low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) appeared to fare badly. LTNs, which seek to encourage cycling and walking by using filters or bollards to block through traffic on some smaller residential streets, while allowing pedestrians and cyclists to pass, have proved a divisive innovation in a series of areas including London, Oxford and Birmingham. A series of dedicated anti-LTN independent candidates stood, while in some places, notably in a series of London boroughs, Conservative and even Lib Dem candidates promised to remove them. No anti-LTN independents won in Friday’s results, although one, standing in Oxford, finished a reasonably close second to Labour. Campaigners’ hopes to unseat pro-LTN Labour candidates in London boroughs like Southwark came to nothing. One potential exception was Enfield, another hotbed of the debate, where the Tories gained eight seats from Labour. • This article was amended on 7 May 2022. The original version confused Hastings in East Sussex with Worthing in West Sussex.