Has Reform UK ‘gained’ more seats than any other party in council by-elections since November?

In posts on social media earlier this month, the leader of Reform UK Nigel Farage MP claimed: “Since Kemi Badenoch became Tory leader, Reform UK have gained more seats in council by-elections than any other party.” 

This claim has been challenged by some X users who’ve claimed it’s inaccurate, and a community note on X describes it as “incorrect”. 

The wording of Mr Farage’s claim doesn’t make it entirely clear what it’s based on—we’ve asked his office and Reform UK about this and not had any response so far. But whether it is correct or not seems to depend on exactly what is understood by the word “gained”.

Full Fact analysis of the best available data we could find on 121 council by-elections in Great Britain since last November suggests that Reform UK saw the largest net gain in seats, but more seats changed hands to the Conservatives than to Reform UK. Meanwhile Labour won the most seats overall. 

Council by-election results

Finding official data on council by-election results nationally is difficult. While individual councils publish results after each election, we’ve not found any official source listing all the results—the Electoral Commission told us that it doesn’t hold a centralised list.

So instead we’ve conducted our own analysis of data gathered by a number of unofficial but widely-cited sources—the websites of Open Council Data UK, Britain Elects and Liberal Democrat peer Lord Pack. Where possible we have cross-checked data on results between these sites, and we found they were largely in agreement, though this was less clear with results from Northern Ireland and for that reason we’ve focused in this fact check on the results in Great Britain only. 

Based on this analysis of the available data, it appears that since Mrs Badenoch became Conservative party leader on 2 November 2024, there have been 123 council by-elections in Great Britain—and 121 of these had occurred by the time Mr Farage made his claim on social media on 11 April. 

It’s true that Reform UK saw the largest net gain in seats across these 121 by-elections. On 2 November 2024 Reform UK held none of these seats, and it won (and increased its number of seats by) 12. The Conservatives began with 15, and won 26 overall—a net increase of 11—while, by contrast, Labour began with 53 seats and ended up winning 36, so had a net loss of 17. The Liberal Democrats began with 29 and won 27. 

Although we don’t know for sure, it appears likely that this data is the basis for Mr Farage’s claim, because these figures closely resemble those posted on X the same day by the chairman of Reform UK.

However, there are other ways of looking at these results, which appears to be why some have challenged Mr Farage’s claim. For example, instead of counting the net change in the number of seats, you could instead simply look at the total number of seats “gained” from another party.

Our analysis suggests that overall more seats changed hands to the Conservatives than to Reform UK. Of the 54 seats that changed hands, 17 went to the Conservatives, while 12 went to Reform. The Conservatives then, arguably, saw more “gains” than Reform, but they also lost six seats while Reform UK lost none, so overall saw a lower net increase than Reform UK. 

You could also simply look at the overall number of seats won in these by-elections, which paints a different picture again. Overall Labour won the most seats in these 121 by-elections (36), followed by the Liberal Democrats (27), Conservatives (26) and then Reform UK (12). 

As noted above, given this analysis relies on unofficial data sources, there may be some uncertainty over the exact figures—but it’s clear that different ways of counting successes in recent by-elections can give a very different picture of parties’ relative performance.