The search for alternative governance in England

The forthcoming local elections are likely to represent a pivotal moment for the Labour government, revealing the extent to which Labour’s national polling decline has translated into local political vulnerability. With Labour defending more than half of the 5,013 council seats up for grabs, commentators have forecast significant losses across England, including London and the North East. In some places, these losses may carry symbolic significance beyond the results, with Labour likely to be displaced in some of its historic strongholds by either Reform UK or the Greens.

However, the significance of these elections extends beyond the fortunes of the current Labour administration. The likely results will also raise broader questions about the nature of local governance in England, the search for alternative forms of governance, and the capacity of political actors to govern differently within a highly constrained institutional environment.

Reform UK and the limits of political agency

After the 2025 local elections in England, the breakthrough success of Reform UK sparked interest in whether Reform-led councils might offer a substantive alternative to established approaches to municipal governance. This interest emerged in the context of a decade of austerity, during which fiscal retrenchment compelled authorities to reduce services, increase local taxation, and manage rising demand with diminishing resources, contributing to declining public satisfaction and trust with local government.

In those local elections, Reform declared a ‘war on waste’. Its candidates only 12 months ago promised to freeze or cut council taxes (which they have not done), to axe staff preoccupied with ‘DEI’ (which would save an estimated 0.003 per cent of the combined budget of Reform authorities), and to establish a Department of Local Government Efficiency (which ultimately proved very short-lived). Reform continues to campaign with zeal in local elections on policies far outside of council control, such as tackling immigration. In office, however, its record has thus far offered limited evidence of any substantive departure from established practice, and analysts have characterised Reform’s approachas superficial rather than substantive.

This raises a broader intellectual question with practical implications: to what extent can new political entrants reshape local government? Reform’s early experience in office suggests that either the room for manoeuvre is more limiting than campaign rhetoric implied, or that it has been unwilling to make the difficult political choices required to depart meaningfully from established approaches to governing.

Reform-led authorities have largely confronted the same structural dilemmas as their predecessors: rising costs and demand in adult social care, homelessness services, and special educational needs provision; an insufficient financial envelope; and continued pressure to raise council tax in order to remain financially solvent. While Reform had presented itself as a disruptive alternative, many of its administrations have, in practice, adopted similar fiscal responses to those pursued elsewhere (though they were able to increase council taxes at a lower rate than the national average). Rather than demonstrating a radically different governing model, Reform appears to have been absorbed into the existing logic of local government administration.

This in part reflects a wider truth about the relationship between local authorities and political agency, which in England operate within a tightly controlled fiscal and legal framework. Their ability to borrow, tax, retain revenues or depart from statutory duties remains heavily circumscribed by central government. Political rhetoric may suggest transformative potential, but institutional constraints often narrow the range of feasible action. In this respect, local government provides a clear example of how administrative structures can discipline political ambition. It also, however, highlights that Reform is not willing to depart too sharply from traditional approaches.

The emergence of a Green alternative?

Given that right-wing populism has so far struggled to offer a distinctive local governing model, attention is turning to the Greens. Nationally the Greens have advanced an interventionist programme including the renationalisation of public services, and the introduction of rent controls, wealth and land value taxes. This radicalism is, at least on the surface, also visible in its local politics. The left-wing faction ‘Greens Organise’ has, for example, sought to develop a more assertive municipal agenda, spearheaded by the former Labour Mayor of North Tyne, Jamie Driscoll. This.  agenda rejects the “managed decline of our communities” and calls on authorities to resist austerity through – it is reported – illegal budget-setting. Hundreds of Green candidates have explicitly endorsed its principles.

Greens Organise presents local government as a vehicle for democratic mobilisation and economic transformation. At the heart of its agenda is the recognition that many of the most acute pressures facing councils — particularly in housing, adult social care, and finance — cannot be solved locally alone. It therefore proposes community organisation and mobilisation as a means of building pressure for long-term national reform. Alongside this, it advocates greater democratic control of local assets, drawing on traditions of community wealth building and municipal ownership. In practice, this includes wider use of procurement to support local firms and social enterprises, the development of co-operatives, and strategies to retain wealth within local economies.

The programme also emphasises transparency and democratic accountability in local finance. Council budgets and financial strategies are frequently opaque, not only to residents but often to elected councillors themselves. A more intelligible and participatory system of municipal finance is therefore presented not simply as a technical improvement, but as a democratic reform in its own right. More controversially, reports suggest that the agenda may extend to forms of direct action in Green-led authorities, including walkouts or collective attempts to set illegal budgets in protest at the current funding regime. Such tactics are framed as a means of exposing the unsustainability of the existing settlement.

Elements of this agenda have merit. It is right to recognise that crises such as homelessness or the erosion of social care cannot be resolved through technocratic efficiencies alone. It is equally right to make the case that local authorities should make better use of their market-shaping potential through procurement, ownership, and institution-building, and that local finance should be more transparent and democratically accessible. These are serious and worthwhile objectives.

Yet like Reform UK, the Greens do not offer a radical alternative. Many of the programme’s most substantive proposals have long been advanced within the Labour tradition of municipal socialism. Community wealth building for instance has been pioneered by Labour authorities in England, and was popularised through high-profile examples such as Preston, Wigan and Camden. In that sense, much of what is presented as radical innovation is better understood as a repackaging of established approaches developed by Labour-run authorities.

The least persuasive aspect of the agenda is its flirtation with illegal budget-setting. Such proposals rest on a misunderstanding of how local governance operates in practice: unlawful budget-setting would be counterproductive and invite significant financial and administrative costs on a authority, intensifying the very pressures such strategies are intended to resist. Second, the proposals also risk substituting symbolic confrontation for serious institutional innovation, revealing an intellectually ‘thin’ response to the structural problems facing local government. Third, it neglects the historical experience of municipal resistance in England, where experiments by Labour authorities from Sheffield, Liverpool and Islington in illegal budget-setting generated political attention but achieved limited durable gains. In that sense, the proposal appears less a radical solution than a repetition of a strategy whose practical and political limitations have already been established.

Conclusion

New models of local governance are clearly needed to arrest declining public trust in councils, and efforts to develop creative responses to entrenched policy problems should be welcomed. In reality, however, claims that either Reform UK or the Green Party offer any genuinely transformative break with existing practice appear overstated. Both have sought to present themselves as insurgent alternatives to an exhausted local government settlement. Yet the evidence thus far suggests a greater degree of continuity than rupture.

This is partly because local government in England remains structurally constrained. The most important levers of fiscal power, legislative discretion, and long-term policy design remain concentrated in Westminster. Within that framework, councils of all political colours are often left managing scarcity rather than redesigning systems. As a result, the capacity of any incoming administration to govern radically differently is narrower than electoral rhetoric often implies.

It is also because political alternatives are tested not in opposition but in office. Reform’s experience in administration suggests that anti-establishment language does not necessarily translate into a distinctive governing model once confronted with statutory duties, budget pressures and service demand. Likewise, while Green municipal proposals contain serious elements — particularly around democratic participation — the more confrontational aspects of their agenda risk reviving strategies whose practical and political limits are already well documented.

None of this is to suggest that political control is irrelevant. Different administrations can and do shape priorities, leadership cultures, procurement choices, environmental policy, and the tone of local democracy. Reform’s hostility to climate change initiatives, for example, has proven distinctive, just as Green administrations may place greater emphasis on climate governance or participatory decision-making. But these are better understood as variations within a common institutional model than as wholesale alternatives to it.

The deeper lesson of the forthcoming elections, therefore, may be less about which party wins control of individual authorities, and more about the enduring limits of local democracy in England.

Jack Shaw is Director of Groundwork Research and a Policy Fellow at The Productivity Institute, the University of Manchester.