Local Elections Track Record May 2023

This page first posted 15 May 2023

Electoral Calculus and pollster Find Out Now ran a predictive poll in the run-up to the local elections in May 2023. How accurate were our predictions?

There were elections to 230 district and unitary councils in England on 4 May 2023. For these elections we ran an MRP poll, which interviewed over 12,000 respondents. The MRP method is often a bit more accurate than traditional polling approaches, and also allows estimates of public opinion in small geographic areas, such as district councils and council wards. More details of the MRP approach are available here.

The MRP poll allowed us to estimate the result in every council ward which was up for election. By adding up the wards won, it also predicts which party would win each council, or whether there was 'no overall control' (NOC) of the council.

The poll predicted that Labour would gain 37 councils and that the Conservatives would lose 32 councils, and the Liberal Democrats would gain three councils. In the event, the Conservatives lost 48 councils and Labour gained 22 councils. So both the major parties did a bit worse than expected and the minor parties did better.

The following table shows the number of councils predicted and actually won by each party:

Of the 230 councils, the vast majority (171) were correctly predicted. Highlights include:

• Correctly predicted Labour gains in:
  • Amber Valley, Blackpool, Bracknell Forest, Brighton and Hove, Broxtowe,
  • Cheshire West and Chester, Dover, East Staffordshire, Erewash, Gravesham, High Peak,
  • Mansfield, Medway, Middlesbrough, North East Derbyshire, Plymouth,
  • South Derbyshire, South Ribble, Stoke-on-Trent, Swindon, West Lancashire, York
• Correctly predicted Conservative losses in 26 councils, and also Conservative gain in Wyre Forest
• Correctly predicted Liberal Democrat gain in Windsor and Maidenhead
• The majority (33 out of 49) councils with new ward boundaries in 2023 were correctly predicted

It's not possible to correctly predict every council, as some are very finely balanced, and others are driven by specific local factors which are hard to capture even in regional MRP polling. Mispredictions include:

• No overall control: there were more councils than we expected where no single party has control of the council. There were 37 such councils (split fairly equally between predicted Conservative and Labour): Bolton, Broadland, Bromsgrove, Cannock Chase, Canterbury, Central Bedfordshire, Charnwood, Darlington, Derbyshire Dales, East Hampshire, East Hertfordshire, East Lindsey, Forest of Dean, Harborough, Lancaster, Melton, Mid Sussex, Newark and Sherwood, North Warwickshire, Redcar and Cleveland, Ribble Valley, Rochford, Rugby, Runnymede, Rutland, Slough, Stafford, Staffordshire Moorlands, Stockport, Stockton-on-Tees, Tandridge, Tonbridge and Malling, Warwick, Wealden, West Devon, West Suffolk, Wirral
• Lib Dem gains: in ten councils, the Lib Dems gained control against our predictions: Chelmsford, Dacorum, Guildford, Kingston upon Hull, Mid Devon, North Devon, Stratford-on-Avon, Surrey Heath, Teignbridge, West Berkshire
• Green gains: the Greens gained Mid Suffolk, which we didn't expect.

The overall council results suggest that the two big parties both did a bit worse than predicted and the minor parties and independents did better.

We can also look at the ward results. These are shown in the table below.

We correctly predicted that the Conservatives would lose over nine hundred seats, which was broadly correct, since they actually lost just over one thousand seats.

But we thought most of those losses would go to Labour. Although Labour made large gains of nearly six hundred seats, that was less than we expected. Instead the Liberal Democrats and the Greens made significant gains which were ahead of our expectations.

Non-MRP Prediction

We also made a public prediction which was based just on published polls of Westminster voting intention.

These polls did not ask specific questions on local election voting, and MRP methods were not used. It implied a Labour-Conservative lead of 5pc, compared with the predicted Lab-Con lead of 15pc from MRP.

The table shows the prediction made, which understated the scale of both Conservative losses and Labour gains.

These results show that the local elections are better predicted with custom polling and MRP methods, rather than by less sophisticated methods.

Comparison with other pollsters

Predicting local elections is a rather specialised business, but one other pollster also made predictions for a few local authorities in 2023. YouGov analysed 18 councils, and made definite predictions for 13 of them (YouGov prediction). Of those they got eight right. (And Electoral Calculus got nine right.)

But there were also five councils which they said were "too close to call". (These were Chichester, North East Lincolnshire, Sheffield, Walsall and Wokingham.) As it happens, Electoral Calculus correctly predicted all five of those councils.

Summary

Overall the MRP prediction worked quite well, and correctly predicted that the Conservatives would lose dozens of councils and that Labour would gain dozens of councils.

Overall, about three-quarters of councils were correctly predicted, which is similar to results from the 2022 prediction. As usual, a minority of councils were mis-predicted.

In terms of predicted seats, the prediction was fairly accurate about the scale of Conservative losses, but the size of Labour's gains was significantly over-predicted.

Technical Details

Find Out Now interviewed 12,203 respondents online between 27 March and 3 April 2023. Data were weighted to be demographically representative of all GB adults by gender, age, social grade, other demographics and past voting patterns.

Appendix

The table shows the prediction and the actual outcome in council control for all the 230 councils which had elections in May 2023.