London 2026: Reform make tiny splash in London, underperforming polling
- Lucy Lydekker
- 11 hours ago
- 7 min read
Earlier this month, I wrote about the Farage plan to secede several outer London boroughs, such as Bromley, Havering, Barking & Dagenham, or Bexley, away from the capital should they win in those councils. Opinion polling had Reform UK on track to be the largest party in several councils, if not in control, but that polling was wrong. Reform massively underperformed in London compared to the rest of the country. In the end, they only managed to gain 80 or so seats across the 1,800 seats up for election in London, that’s 4%. They won control of one council, Havering, which accounts for nearly half of the councillors they won. How did they underperform and why?
Headlines in Havering
Looking at Havering, you see a stark rejection of the two major parties. Labour held onto just two seats on 10% of the vote, while the Tories lost all 23 of their seats and flattened to 14% of the vote. Reform won 39 of the 55 seats on the council, with 13 more going to two Residents Associations. Nationally, two of their MPs are Conservatives, while one is one of the eight sitting Reform MPs in the House of Commons, a Tory defecting Andrew Rosindell. But in particular there’s a few reasons why Reform was able to win this council but no others.
Havering in particular has always been very euro-sceptic, being voted the most euro-sceptic area of Britain, according to YouGov, back in 2016. The borough also elected the most UKIP councillors of any borough in London. The Romford Recorders reported this year that Garrington Property Finders ranked Havering as the worst London borough to live in, and it is clear from these statistics why the borough’s voters may reject the two main parties and want something more extreme.
The borough was carved out of Essex in the 1965 Greater London expansion and never seemed to carry a true London identity, but this was the case to a bunch of other boroughs from Hillingdon to Bromley to Enfield, all of whom seem much more integrated than Havering. Romford though, its biggest town, has a notorious reputation for being anti-London, with the aforementioned Rosindell campaigning for Havering’s return to Essex.
It is the whitest borough in London, with Romford being even more white than the borough average. And we can see from the Essex county election results which happened simultaneously that support for Reform there is higher than the rest of the country by about 8pts and with them winning 2/3rds of seats. The greater Essex area has a clear right-wing tradition, with the first UKIP MP Douglas Carswell being elected in Clacton in 2015, Farage himself being elected in Clacton in 2024, and former Reform MP James McMurdock winning in Basildon.
Projections versus results
For comparisons, we can look at the results in 3 boroughs who pollsters thought had high chances of going Reform, and how well they performed there. To select these boroughs, I’ve used the final YouGov MRP poll, but for the projected seat counts as a result of these polls, I am using the website PollCheck, which is its own independent model- it is itself not necessarily a trusted model, but it gives you a sense of how off some of the polls were.
Barking and Dagenham, one of the most bizarre boroughs to have been projected for Reform, considering they had voted 80% for Labour back in 2022 and won all 51 seats up for election. Nevertheless, YouGov had Reform on 30% of the vote, with a vote floor 6pts higher and vote ceiling 3pts higher, than Labour with 26% of the vote. The real results saw that, perhaps such a momentous collapse wasn’t implausible, as Labour landed on 34%- still a drop of more than half- but Reform managed only 24%, almost level with the Greens on 22%. The model, although it had Labour on 40%, was almost completely accurate with its seat projections: Labour on 38, down 9, but maintaining control of the council by a considerable degree. Reform only won three wards in the end, Eastbrook & Rush Green, Parsloes, and Goresbrook.
Bexley had been a Conservative-run council since 2006 with the Tories on 30 seats to Labour’s 12 at the time of dissolution. There had been an electoral test in the neighbouring borough of Dartford, in Kent, in 2025. Although Reform was polling a few points higher this time last year, it is a valuable comparison. I could do a whole article on the South East London and North Kent area and its similarities, but the long and short of it is that both have very similar demographics, interlinked transport connections, were previously part of the same administration as recent as the 1920s, had traditionally voted Conservative for the most time, and at the 2024 general election voted Labour.
That being said, Dartford is the longest serving bellwether constituency in the country, meaning that it has voted in the same party as the governing party since 1950, whereas two of the three constituencies in Bexley were considered safe Tory seats, for the most part. As Reform UK is a party of the right-wing, cannibalising the Conservatives, you would expect then that Bexley’s willingness to vote for the Tories more so than Dartford would lead to an even greater Reform landslide. However, Reform completely underperformed expectations.
YouGov had both the Conservatives and Reform neck and neck around ~30% of the voteshare. Reform actually got pretty much that percentage in the real election, while the Conservatives overperformed and won 34% of the vote. You may be asking then, even though Reform didn’t get as high as the 40s as it did in Dartford, how is 29% an underperformance for a party that has never stood here before?
Well considering they could’ve picked up the council, and it formed a key part of Nigel Farage’s London campaign with a visit to Welling in April, it was quite embarrassing that they only won 7 of 45 seats here. Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, was so pleased with the result, where they won 29 seats- down just ONE from before dissolution- that she held her post-election speech in Bexley.
Glancing over to electoral models projecting voting intention for a general election, such as the Election Maps nowcast, we can see that the borough has roughly three political journeys. The Conservatives are at their safest in the parts of Old Bexley & Sidcup in the south, while Reform are forecast to pick up Bexleyheath & Crayford in the middle, leaving Erith & Thamesmead to the north remaining one of the safest Labour seats in the country.
Therefore, speculation was for some of the middle wards to flip Reform- it did, but not as severely. The two wards which Reform won in totality were Crayford and Northumberland Heath, both part of the Bexleyheath & Crayford constituency- the former being a Tory held ward, and the latter a Labour held ward which they had won back in 2022. A further seat went for Reform in West Heath, the other two remaining Conservative.
Most worryingly for Labour was the ward of Slade Green & Northend which had several recounts. It is the seat of Stefano Borella, leader of the Labour group, and the results found that Labour held onto both seats there by an incredible 1 seat gap between Labour’s Donna Briant and Reform’s John McDermot.
Furthermore, Reform also managed to pick up one of three seats in the Belvedere ward, part of the very safe Erith & Thamesmead seat- a ward in which they were projected to come third in with 21% of the vote, but where they ended up on 31% just one point behind Labour. This ward in particular is the former ward of Daniel Francis, who quit his councillor position after being elected MP for Bexleyheath and Crayford in 2024.
It is safe to say that this election probably gave anxiety to Bexley Labour HQ here, and it poses a real question of how Labour can win back wards at the next election more so than the Conservatives who will carry on control- they did maintain their status as the largest opposition party though. Reform will be disappointed at the result here, but cautiously optimistic they can pick up one of three seats here at the next general election.
Bromley, next door to Bexley to the south, was a similar story, so I won’t go too much into it. The YouGov poll had Reform and the Conservatives neck and neck on 23-24%, but this was inaccurate for both parties in different ways. The Conservatives actually finished on a 35% vote share, massively up from the poll, while Reform fell to 20%. A margin of 15pts was not expected when YouGov had Bromley breaking for Reform.
The PollCheck projection, which had Reform 6pts ahead of the Conservatives, had Reform winning 21 seats out of 58 seats, which wouldn’t have been enough to form a government most likely but is much higher than the 6 seats they actually won. That is 6 out of 58, which is both a lower number than in Bexley and a much lower percentage. The places they won include one seat in Mottingham (not Nottingham), all seats in St Paul’s Cray, and all seats in Biggin Hill, which is coincidentally the place Farage spoke about a potential Bromley secession from London if they won.
That begs the question, we know why Reform did well in Havering, but why did they underperform so badly in the other councils?
I don’t think it was the aforementioned mentions of leaving London, I don’t think any part of that campaign would’ve broken through the news cycle enough to have made an impact, especially when turnout for local elections are usually low anyway. But maybe enough people in boroughs such as Bexley and Bromley saw the remarks and thought they’d rather stay inside London.
It could be general satisfaction with the current Conservative-run councils that Reform members generally decided to back the incumbents. Maybe constituents saw how easily places like Dartford swung for Reform last year and voted tactically for the ones best placed to win. There has also been significant criticism over how Reform has run Kent County Council, including their promise not to raise council tax, then raising it by 4% anyway. It could also be that these boroughs are more affluent than places like Havering, prompting them to stick with the status quo.
One of the hardest parts in the 2029 campaign for Reform, and to be honest the 2028 London elections, will be having genuinely good candidates. These talents will be born and bred in these local councils, and the fact they underperformed the only London local elections before those key elections will damage their chances. Reform have already selected their London mayoral candidate Laila Cunningham, but they need a slate of competent London Assembly member candidates too, and a good ground game of campaigners and activists to stay motivated. I think the key message for Reform from these results is that they will need to work much harder if they want to win over the capital’s voters.
Other London results
If you're curious about how the London electoral results turned out for the other parties, view the other articles such as our general overview, the Green's result, and the major parties' results.
