More councils, particularly in London, are expected to end up with no party in overall control – raising the prospect of slower and more fractious decision-making.
The Green Party is expected to do well, but we can be even more certain there will be lots of green councillors – lower case. Voters are bound to elect numerous candidates with no prior experience in the job.
And as is the case after any election, optimistic victors may find it more frustrating than they imagined when it comes to wielding power. This is a law of nature that Labour in Westminster has amply demonstrated since taking office in 2024.
Both Reform and the Green Party are poised to make major gains at the expense of Tory and Labour councillors.
Reform has pledged to cut waste and red tape, and to give local people more say and sway. It has also pledged to scrap net zero policies and suggested that new development should be focused on existing conurbations – which conveniently happen to lie outside its heartlands.
Fortunately for landlords, developers and investors, councils of any political stripe have limited powers
While it is often difficult to tell knockabout soundbites from actual Reform policy, one outcome worth banking on is that Reform-led councils will want to keep council tax low. This in turn may lead to under-resourced planning departments, among other shortcomings.
Green Party policies, by contrast, tend to be set out with greater clarity. But they can be no less arresting.
At the party’s conference last October, a motion titled ‘Abolish landlords’ was adopted as policy. It argued that the private rental sector “is a vehicle for wealth extraction, funnelling money from renters to the landlord class” and that landlords provide “no positive value to the economy or society”.
In voting through the motion, the party has pledged to outlaw buy-to-let mortgages, impose rent controls, create a land value tax to extract cash from landlords and levy further taxes on empty properties.
Developers, while not quite as reviled as landlords, are also in the party’s sights. Leader Zack Polanski told the BBC that “excess profiteering, as we know, absolutely goes on” and that housing “should be built as homes and not for profits”.
Fortunately for landlords, developers and investors, councils of any political stripe have limited powers. They cannot shoo development away to sites beyond their borders, impose any form of rent control or ban buy-to-let landlords. What they can do, however, is uproot the current goalposts.
Councils can impose rental licensing schemes across swathes of homes, hold back grant funding, impose onerous Section 106 obligations, and refuse schemes on sustainability or social value grounds.
On top of which, newly elected councillors will arrive just as central government pushes through policies to curtail their powers over planning. Whatever the results on polling day, we should all expect fireworks.
